HAPPY-GO-LUCKY, Mike Leigh (2008) / Life! A bowl of cherries, or is it the pits?

Just how hard is it to be happy? Poppy is an irrepressibly free-spirited schoolteacher who brings an infectious laugh and an unsinkable sense of optimism to every situation she encounters, offering us a touching, truthful, and deeply life-affirming exploration of one of the most mysterious and elusive of all human qualities: happiness. Poppy's ability to maintain her perspective is tested as the story begins and her commuter bike is stolen. However, she enthusiastically signs up for driving lessons with Scott, who turns out to be her nemesis – a fuming, uptight cynic. As the tension of their weekly lessons builds, Poppy encounters other challenges to her positive state of mind: a fiery flamenco instructor, her bitter pregnant sister, a troubled homeless man, and a young bully in her class, not to mention that she has thrown out her back. How this affects not only Poppy's worldview but also the outlook of those around her begs the question "glass half full or half empty"?

Directed and written by Mike Leigh
Producers: Simon Channing Williams, Georgina Lowe
Starring Sally Hawkins (Poppy), Alexis Zegerman (Zoe), Eddie Marsen (Scott), Samuel Roukin (Tim)
Cinematography: Dick Pope
Edited by Jim Clark
Music: Gary Yershon
Release date: 18 April 2008 (UK)
Running time: 1h 58m

HOW THIS WORKS
To find out where to rent or stream Happy-Go-Lucky online, visit JustWatch.com. (Note: It's available on Kanopy and Hoopla.) Watch it on your own during the week and then join us for our Zoom conversation Saturday, August 16. A Zoom link will appear on the right of your screen once you RSVP. (NOTE: If you can’t get that link to work, copy and paste it into the search bar of your browser.) First-timers must sign up no later than Friday 8/15 in order to ensure being admitted.

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How does happiness appear to you? Does it look like the manic energy of second-graders in a bouncy house at a birthday party? Or the serenity of dancing beneath a diamond sky with one hand waving free, as the Bard of Hibbing sings it? Obviously it's some of both, and in the way Poppy Cross lives her life both are manifested by turns (though more of the former, decidedly). Her buoyant spirit keeps her afloat no matter what comes, even as we wonder where she's coming from and how long she can keep this up.

Happy-Go-Lucky allows us to reflect on happiness without forcing the issue. Largely this is due to Poppy's through-line of willingness to encounter the moment on its own terms, while never succumbing to its demands or ducking its requirements. Sometimes this expresses itself in unforced compassion, sometimes in dangerous naivete, sometimes in over-the-top hijinks, but it's all Poppy, all the phenomenal Sally Hawkins, and we're carried along on a current of fascination and delight, waiting for what comes next and for her next inspiration.

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TRAILER, RATINGS, EXTRAS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y230r-imiHM

Rotten Tomatoes: Tomatometer 93% rating of 161 reviews
Metacritic: 84 rating based on 34 reviews (universal acclaim), "Must See"

For her turn as Poppy Cross, Sally Hawkins took home a Golden Globe award for Best Actress and the Berlin Film Festival's Silver Bear in the same category, along with Best Actress accolades from the New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. She's since supplemented those honors with Academy Award nominations for Blue Jasmine (Best Supporting Actress, 2013) and The Shape of Water (Best Actress, 2017).

The name "En-ra-ha," a driver safety teaching prompt used repeatedly by Eddie Marsan's character Scott as a reminder for the driver to look in the car's mirrors, has become a catch phrase associated both with the film and with Marsan as an actor. He invented the name during his improvisational preparation for the film, inspired by a recording of the English occultist Aleister Crowley.

BLURBS & ATTITUDES
As refreshing as it is to find a movie that leaves you smiling, it's something much rarer to discover a film that makes you think about what a commitment to happiness really means. ∞ Liam Lacey, Toronto Globe and Mail,

The picture as a whole benefits not merely from the excellent performances, but from its warm emotional core and its infectious love of people, topped off by a mature (though not jaded) sobriety about human limitations that thoroughly validates everything preceding it. ∞ Nathan Southern, TV Guide Magazine

Mr. Leigh has never been an artist for whom happy (word or idea) has been an easy fit. Life is sweet, as the title of another of his films puts it with a heart-swelling yes, but it’s also an eternal fight against doom and gloom, the soul-crushing no ... Happy-Go-Lucky is so closely tuned to the pulse of communal life, to the rhythms of how people work, play and struggle together, it captures the larger picture along with the smaller. Like Poppy, the bright focus of this expansive, moving film, Mr. Leigh isn't one to go it alone. Played by a glorious Sally Hawkins – a gurgling, burbling stream of gasps, giggles and words – Poppy ... keeps moving forward and dancing and jumping and laughing and nodding her dark, delicate head as if she were agreeing not just with this or that friend but also with life itself. She's altogether charming or perhaps maddening – much depends on whether you wear rose-colored specs – recognizably human and every inch a calculated work of art. ∞ Manohla Dargis, New York Times

Leigh and his actors work mysterious magic in Happy-Go-Lucky. This is a movie about hitting the groove of everyday life and, nearly miraculously, getting music out of it. ∞ Stephanie Zacharek, Salon

It stays with you like great movies tend to do. It asks you to examine the inner mechanisms of human beings, cheerful and miserable alike. It's not about looking at a glass half empty or a glass half full. It's about drinking down what's in that glass and letting it fill your soul. ∞ Stephen Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer

The interaction between Scott the bullying control freak and the giggly chatterbox who responds to his barking orders with tongue-in-cheek exclamations of obedience is at first hilarious; then hilarious with dissonant notes; then, later, unnerving bordering on terrifying. Scott’s sudden vulnerability doesn’t lead to his loosening up, as in screwball comedies. The very notion of freedom—personal, cultural, political—threatens his self-esteem ... As Poppy is tested (not just by Scott but by other intrusions of cruelty), we begin to see that hers is not a life of whimsy but a design for living that’s deep and hard-won. ∞ David Edelstein, New York Magazine (Vulture)

Typically of Leigh, he again withholds his own judgment as to whether Hawkins is a delight or a terror. But he does create a noticeable tension between the audience's expectations and the way the story plays out. ∞ Noel Murray, A.V. Club

Get ready for Sally Hawkins, a dynamo of an actress who will have her way with you in Happy-Go-Lucky, leaving you enchanted, enraged to the point of madness, and utterly dazzled. No list of the year's best performances should be made without her .... In lesser hands, the film would go off the deep end into cheap theatrics. But Leigh ... keeps the emotions in balance by keeping them real. There's something raw in Hawkins that wins our empathy for Poppy. Thanks to her, Happy-Go-Lucky is more than a movie, it's a gift. ∞ Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

As is always the case with Leigh's protagonists, Poppy does not fit into a schematic log line: she simply is. She exists with an intensity that few other filmmakers' characters can manage because of the singular way Leigh creates his people. ∞ Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

The movie is not an argument for chaos; it’s an argument for making one’s way through life with a relaxed will and an open heart. The optimism is exploratory, not programmatic; Leigh is no flower child. The only trouble with his scheme is that he has counterposed free-spiritedness and paralyzed moralism as mutually exclusive states, and there has to be something else—something like Leigh’s film itself, which knows how to play easily within a firm over-all structure. Happy-Go-Lucky is triumphant proof that a creative middle way is always possible. ∞ David Denby, The New Yorker