Happy-go-Lucky

 "To prattle" is to talk at length about trivial and inconsequential things, to speak childishly and repetitively.  In Mike Leigh's 2008 Happy-go-Lucky, the heroine, Poppy Cross prattles incessantly, maintaining a constant babbling stream of inane observations, half-reproaches, praise and encouragement.  She speaks incessantly and desperately as if to reassure herself that she exists, that she has agency, that she is present.  Poppy is baffling -- throughout Leigh's movie, she remains blithely optimistic and recklessly cheerful.  Something seems to be wrong with her, but we can't determine what it is and her strangely cheerful demeanor is, at once, intensely engaging and, even, endearing while also more than a bit uncanny.  In one scene, she goes to a doctor with serious  back pain; she tells the doctor her pain makes her laugh and she giggles continuously -- it may be that she has to keep up her cheerful patter in order to keep from collapsing into tears.  But this interpretation is too facile.  Poppy's optimistic and happy-go-luck temperament is a matter of her "humor" to use the 18th century concept -- this seems to be the way she was born, invested with an excess of ebullient high-spirits.  Happy-go-Lucky is that rare film that is about someone who is cheerful, kind, and, even, competent in her own way -- Leigh doesn't encourage us to speculate as to whether this demeanor is some kind of compensation.  The film insists on remaining on the surface; Poppy (as brilliantly played by Sally Hawkins) is happy because that is just the way she is.

Poppy is an elementary-age teacher.  At one point, we learn that she is widely traveled; she spent five years working as a teacher in Southeast Asia.  She lives with her practical roommate Zoe, also a teacher.  There is a very slight, delicate intimation that Poppy and Zoe may have been lovers once -- they seem intimate with one another, although this is possibly just the result of more than ten years close contact.  Poppy and Zoe go out to night clubs and dance until dawn.  They avoid romantic entanglements.  Both are committed and observant teachers who work on the weekends to make costumes and masks for their students.  When Poppy's bicycle is stolen, a theft that she takes in due course without much regret, she decides to learn to drive.  She hires a driving instructor named Sam to teach her behind-the-wheel.  Sam is one of Mike Leigh's typical badly damaged males -- he's a racist and conspiracy theorist, using occult theory developed by Aleistar Crowley to conduct his driving lessons:  the main rear view mirror, he calls Enraha, after the all-seeing eye at the pyramid of things.  Although he brow-beats and bullies Poppy, it's obvious that he is obsessed with her and would like to make her his girlfriend, although he's too strange, paranoid, and prickly to make any overt moves.  Poppy attends a Flamenco dance in which the exuberant, vehement teacher breaks down and flees the room in sorrow at her break-up with her boyfriend.  (In the world of Happy-go-Lucky, everyone has emotional problems and struggles except for Poppy who seems indifferent to the Sturm und Drang of life.)  One of Poppy's students is a bully.  Poppy infers that he is the victim in turn of cruelty at home.  A male social worker is recruited to interview the six or seven-year old boy and, indeed, it turns out that his mother's boyfriend is hitting him.  The handsome social worker is intrigued by the attractive, irrepressibly happy Poppy and makes a date with her.  She has sex with him and the relationship seems promising.  Meeting for the fourth or fifth driving session with Sam, Poppy brings along her new boyfriend.  (Sam has been glimpsed around Poppy's apartment, probably stalking her.)  Sam is outraged and stunned, prostrate with strangled jealousy, drives like a maniac, and almost crashes the car.  Poppy takes away his keys deciding that he is too upset to be behind-the-wheel.  This leads to an actual struggle in which Sam punches Poppy and pulls her hair.  She threatens to call the cops and, when Sam calms down, tells him that they aren't going to continue with the driving lessons.  Zoe and Poppy go rowing a boat on a small lagoon -- life is but a dream -- and as they coordinate their oar strokes, Poppy's boyfriend calls her to set up another date.  Poppy has said about Sam:  You can't make everyone happy but, at least, you can try."  There are several minor episodes that go nowhere  and seem to be improvised-- Poppy visits her married sister in suburb of London, Poppy has a back ache,  Poppy's sisters encourage her to make something of her life, in a bookstore, Poppy who is hungover tries to flirt with the clerk who rudely rebuffs her.  

The pivotal scene in the movie is emblematic, not narrative.  While Poppy is walking alone at night, she hears guttural noises and cries.  She fearlessly enters a corroding industrial site, an abandoned factory or warehouse, in which she encounters a man who is very seriously, floridly mentally ill.  The man is large, bearded, and, sometimes, threatening.  Poppy however approaches him and tries to talk, continuing her cheerful prattle as he mutters nouns and verbs over and over again -- to insane to say anything that makes any sense at all.  On several occasions, he becomes even more agitated and we fear that he will attack the heroine.  In the end, he wanders off in a harsh, abstract geometry of rusting trestles and girders. The episode is anecdotal and quite frightening.  But, however, we view the threat, Poppy is not afraid, shows no fear at all, and seems genuinely compassionate in her efforts to console the man.  In this scene, Poppy's pervasive cheerfulness seems to verge on something pathological -- she becomes in our eyes, a kind of holy fool.

The movie is a pendant to Leigh's recent Hard Truths, another 'comedy of humors' that approaches the concept from its opposite pole.  In Hard Truths, the heroine is angry, suspicious, and vengeful; she's cruel to the point of ferocious madness to those closest to her.  Leigh makes no attempt to explicate this heroine's ferocity -- it's just the way she is.  Hard Truths (2024) shows us the other side of the coin embodied by Poppy's good-natured cheerfulness.  In both cases, there's a suggestion that the heroines are seriously maladjusted to the world in which they find themselves.  Sally Hawkins who plays Poppy looks like a young Roseanne Arquette and she's effortlessly brilliant in the part; Eddie Marsan who plays the mad driving instructor is scary, pathetic, and funny at the same time.  The acting and direction is beyond reproach.