Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)

Sal and I saw this movie at Video Group a couple of days ago. During the discussion period afterwards, people talked as if there were a necessary trade off between seriousness and good spirits and that that was what the movie was about.

But first impressions cannot always be trusted.

Sal and I both had problems hearing the movie in the Church living room. We felt we were missing significant dialogue. So we rented a copy and watched it again again at home with subtitles on. On this viewing, we didn’t find the main character, Poppy, scattered or wacky at all. She even drove well, we were suprised to discover.

Looking closely at the text, I can pull out some problems in her family, particularly with her relationship to her father. She seems relatively out of contact with that guy. Her brother-in-law is in amicable contact with him, we are told, but he is a saint, this brother-in-law. He deserves all the goes at Playstation he can get.

So it is possible that depth problems with her father predispose Poppy to engage with troubled men more than another woman might, to step an extra foot into the shared social space, as it were. Men like Scott, the bridge guy, the bookstore clerk, and even the little playground bully, whose name I have forgotten for the moment. It is too soon to tell whether her relationship with the social worker will break the mold or repeat it. It is nice that the writer/director doesn’t fill in this fellow’s character too much. (He’s not an obvious bully! Nice eyes, I guess. But what do we really know?)

The picture on the DVD box is peculiar. Did you notice? There’s Poppy getting a ride on some bloke’s shoulders at the beach, just as in the movie. Except on the box it is her date, the Social Worker with the broad shoulders, who is doing the carrying. But that’s not how it is in the movie. In the movie, she rides briefly on the shoulders of her brother-in-law, who records the experience in his back—this movie generates clients for chiropractors!

By someone’s having Poppy climb on her date’s back for the promo shot, the balance of the movie is shifted slightly. The movie is about Poppy’s relationships with all the world—family, friends, pupils, co-workers, clerks, passersby.... It is not especially about the one-on-one romantic thing that is advertised by the fake still.