Site Presented By
Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Toronto Film Festival
The celebrated director talks about his buoyant, bighearted new picture, "Happy-Go-Lucky." (Toronto Film Festival)
By Stephanie Zacharek
Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Arts & Entertainment, Toronto Film Festival, Mike Leigh
Sept. 10, 2008 | TORONTO -- At the heart of Mike Leigh's buoyant but decidedly not simplistic "Happy-Go-Lucky" is a single performance: Sally Hawkins -- who has had roles in several of Leigh's pictures, as well as in numerous British films and TV series -- plays Poppy, a North London elementary-school teacher who is, to put it simply, relentlessly happy.
We meet Poppy during the movie's opening credits sequence, where we see a girl with a wide smile, wearing a brightly colored crochet sweater, pedaling through London on her bike. She's laughing and smiling, seemingly for no reason; she waves to people she probably doesn't even know. She wanders into a bookstore and begins chattering, cheerfully, to the sullen clerk, who simply ignores her. She emerges from the store to find her bike has been stolen, which she treats as a big laugh.
The first time I saw that opening sequence, I wasn't sure I could stand watching this woman for the next 90 minutes or so. But that, I think, is part of Leigh's marvelous, meandering plan: Just a few scenes later, I wanted to know more about her, as it became gradually clear that Poppy's resolute happiness does not signal a lack of depth. Poppy isn't happy because she retreats from the world -- she's happy because she's so fully in it. Which doesn't mean that her life is one big laugh: She springs to action when she sees one of her students behaving aggressively, knowing that his brutish behavior is a symptom of his own unhappiness. She signs up for driving lessons and gets stuck with a weirdo driving instructor named Scott (played by marvelous English actor Eddie Marsan), a freakishly uptight guy with some strange and rigid ideas about race relations and a fearsome, volatile temper. But instead of recoiling from Scott, Poppy tries to cajole him out of his perpetual bad mood, as if she senses intuitively that his inflexibility is causing him a great deal of suffering. When Poppy goes to see a chiropractor, and he cracks her back, she giggles and says, "That hurts so much it makes me laugh," which could be a motto for the way she navigates the world around her.
Hawkins won the best actress prize at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, and that jury knew what it was doing: This is the performance to see this year, one that lots of people will be talking about through the fall and winter. (The film opens on Oct. 10.) Leigh knows what he's got in his star, as he made clear when I spoke with him here in Toronto. He also talks about the mistake of assuming that an optimistic picture is necessarily a simplistic one, and about the character he and Hawkins created, particularly her "natural, ordinary courage." (Listen to the interview here.)
That comparison resonates with me, and everything you said makes sense, except for one thing -- although of course you didn't really say this -- the thing about Poppy is, she's not actually neurotic at all. She's very together, very focused, and very open and honest, truthful with herself and everyone else, but she has a great sense of humor, and the capacity to be zany when she wants to be zany.
I'm very flattered by Mr. Hoberman's comparison. I'm greatly influenced by Dickens, and I love Dickens, so that's good news. I didn't know he said that.
But you can be forgiven at the beginning of the film for thinking, I don't know whether I want to spend time with this character. The first thing you see is Poppy on her bicycle -- she's being very nice, just waving at people. Then she's having a laugh with this very curmudgeonly guy in the bookshop. And then she has her bicycle stolen, and she's very philosophical about it.
The next scene, when she's been clubbing and things -- well, she's just one of the girls. It's all there for you to get the hang of her very quickly, and she's not at all neurotic. It's about seeing how one can deal with stuff in life.
Most of the critics I know who are seeing the movie for the first time have really loved it. And then there are people who've said that it doesn't deal enough with the dark side of life. But Poppy isn't closed in at all, and her openness is a very risky thing. Maybe people are making the mistake of thinking that because this is an optimistic picture, it's an uncomplicated one.I agree. The problem, which has nothing to do with this film as such, is that some of the people that you are talking about are so marinated in the whole syndrome of what they've become, by dint of what they do, which is that they look at the world not in terms of the world itself but in terms of movies and in terms of what movies are and should be and should do. So a comment like "It should be darker," or "It should deal with dark things," is just ridiculous, and the notion that the film is simplistic because it's about optimism, because it's about someone who's an optimist -- is just deeply illogical, really, apart from being irresponsible.
The film is actually extremely complex, as you say. It deals with all kinds of tensions and multidimensional views of the world and has its own dialectic. That's all a very fancy way of saying that we're looking at real people, in a real way in the real world.
Obviously, there are things that happen in the film that are heightened: For example, at a certain point she hears some strange chanting and she goes into this dark place, and there's this tramp -- it's all about her openness and her natural, ordinary courage, and her capacity not to be judgmental, and her immediate instinct to listen and understand and love. That's what it's about, basically.
One of the ways movies work on us is that we make investments in characters, sometimes very early on in a picture. And with Poppy, I was filled with fear that something terrible was going to happen to her.Sure, and that's because hard-wired into your expectations is that that's what happens in movies. The fact is, when threatening things do happen [in the movie], when the possibility sort of floats across the narrative, she's there to deal with it. Scott becomes extremely aggressive, but apart from anything else, Poppy's a consummate professional, and a sympathetic teacher, and she knows how to deal with children and childish behavior. He's a grown child, and she knows it. She can see what he's about, and she deals with it.
Next page: "You have to meet this girl. She's fantastic"
Visit the Movie Page for more reviews, plus critics' picks and more.
Mr. Smith makes a "Porno"
The quiet man
Love and marriage
Toronto Film Festival
Submit