Happy Go Lucky: A Quick Review

Several bad signs for any movie:

• Ten minutes into the movie, I want to punch the female lead in the face. Repeatedly.
• 40 minutes into the movie, I look at the running time on the DVD player and yell "JESUS CHRIST, WE'VE BEEN WATCHING THIS MOVIE FOR 40 MINUTES AND NOTHING HAS HAPPENED YET!"
• Eighty minutes into the movie, I want to punch the female lead in the face again. Harder.
• One Hundred minutes in, you realize that the genre listed here is "comedy" but you have yet to so much as crack a smile.
  
• You realize the most sympathetic character in the movie was the violent, racist one.
  

Well, that was Happy Go Lucky for me.

I'm a big Mike Leigh fan. I've seen and enjoyed most of his movies, and I love the naturalistic way he works. His movies tend to be more character driven than plot driven. Unfortunately, I hated most of the characters in Happy Go Lucky.

Sally Hawkins (who has been universally praised for her role, and won the Golden Globe) plays Poppy, a freakishly peppy and optimistic twit of a primary school teacher. Poppy just wanders through life trying to infect people with her joyful outlook. That's the plot. Her worldview comes across more like a minor form of mental retardation, and in fact it took me 20 or 30 minutes to decide that the character wasn't autistic or something.

It isn't much of a stretch to say that nothing actually happens in the movie. The main plot streams are "Poppy dates a guy", "Poppy takes driving lessons", "Poppy take dance lessons" and "Poppy chats with a homeless guy". A lot of the scenes are unrelated. Almost none of the characters actually change. The entire movie is Poppy going about her life, more or less unaffected by anything she sees. Now, I'm fine with plotless movies... I count Before Sunrise among my favorites, and nothing happens there. But the key was that I liked the characters. I couldn't stand Poppy.

The one interesting character / thread in the movie to me was her driving instructor, an angry, repressed guy who probably reads a lot of Ayn Rand. Though he wasn't a likable character, he had an intensity that drove the scenes he was in.

Since I saw Happy Go Lucky a few weeks back, I've read a whole battery of other reviews from professional critics I respect, and they all loved it. I can't remember having such a wide disconnect with so many of these folks on any film. It's obvious we watched the same movie, and to some degree the success of the movie hinged on whether or not you bought into Poppy.

I didn't.

I have no idea whether or not to recommend this movie to anyone. I might be the lone shithead dissing the movie, and you might very well enjoy it. If so, I'd be interested to hear why. But from my end, I've already wasted enough thought on it for now.