Looking on the bright side

Is it possible to make a deeply compelling film about a truly good character? My response to this question would generally be negative or at best sceptical. In my view, the best stories are the ones in which there is conflict that cannot be reduced to mere formula, or ones which present heroes that are flawed, or raise issues that are not easily solved. I find it difficult to embrace ‘good’ or ‘positive’ characters because they tend to reflect only one aspect of human nature and thus overlook some of the difficult aspects of life. Mike Leigh is a director whose films excel at telling difficult stories. They generally focus on tragicomic characters who live at the ‘wrong’ end of the social spectrum. His films tell stories of these characters’ lives that are rather grim and painful. Leigh is also known for his trademark improvisational style: he doesn’t employ a real script and his actors sometimes aren’t aware of the direction of the plot until the day of shooting.

His first film since 2004’s Vera Drake is Happy-Go-Lucky, which marks a departure for Leigh both in terms of tone and feel. This is perhaps his mellowest film, and it is also the most purely entertaining (in the best sense of the word). Leigh’s films always reveal multi-layered and interesting characters, and this film is no exception. Despite the different tone and feel, Happy-Go-Lucky still bears all the rich and provocative nuances of a Mike Leigh film and, in my view (and against my sensibilities!), is one of the best and most enjoyable films I have seen so far this year. Perhaps it is possible, in very skilled and capable hands like Leigh, to tell a truly engaging story about a person who at the core is simply ‘good’.

Happy-Go-Lucky is essentially a character study of a youngish woman named Poppy (Sally Hawkins, who won the Best Actress award at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival for this performance). The film does not contain a specific plot so much as it is a sequence of individual, but linked, vignettes concerning Poppy’s everyday life. The film relies so heavily on Poppy (she is in every scene) that, without question, the film stands or falls on how the audience embraces Poppy’s character. Fortunately, one cannot help but fall in love with her, and after two hours with her you will wish you could spend more time with her and that you knew more people like her. This fact is made more remarkable in that our introduction to Poppy shows someone who is simple, zippy, chatty, and even slightly annoying, albeit in an endearing way. As the film progresses, Poppy slowly but surely becomes a multi-faceted character who shows a great deal of complexity, thought, and compassion. Not enough can be said about Hawkins’s portrayal here; she does a fantastic job of creating a character who could potentially be irritating, clichéd or even false, and instead makes her a very real person whose company we crave. She is different from other Leigh heroines in that her external behaviour doesn’t seem to mask underlying insecurities or dark secrets.

Happy-Go-Lucky opens with Poppy cycling through central London on her way to a bookshop in Camden Town. Once there, she terrifies the bookshop assistant simply by chatting and being kind to him. She appears to be someone who enjoys people and sees the best in them. She is someone who tries to make people happy with her constant chatter and jokes. Even when she returns to find that her bike has been stolen, she tries to be positive about it, even seeing it as an opportunity to start driving lessons. Poppy is initially presented as someone who has little sense of responsibility, so it is a surprise when we see her at work – as a primary school teacher. The rest of the film shows Poppy partying with friends, preparing school lessons with fellow teacher and flatmate Zoe (Alexis Zegerman), learning to drive, acting as a surrogate mum to her sisters, and taking flamenco lessons (one of the funniest scenes in the film).

Leigh replaces one of his trademark characters – the taxi driver – with a driving instructor. One of the stories which the film particularly focuses on is the relationship between Poppy and her driving instructor, Scott (Eddie Marsan). He couldn’t be more different from her: neat, tidy, conservative, distrustful, fearful and angry. Scott seems to be happy in a world where safety is of paramount importance, and there is a clear sense in his world that there is a right and wrong way to do everything. Poppy’s entrance to his world is truly a disruption of his categories for how life should be. She wears the ‘improper’ kind of shoes for driving, she disregards many of the dangers of driving, she asks Scott a lot of personal questions and challenges his assumptions about people. That their relationship builds to an explosive climax is not surprising, and yet the way it is handled is both powerful and moving. In many ways, Poppy’s and Scott’s ways of viewing the world serve for Leigh as a clever examination of multicultural London and how modern-day Britons either embrace or fear what it has become. The film portrays London neither as urban hell nor as a Richard Curtis-inspired dreamland, but rather as a city as colourful, frenzied, and charming as Poppy herself.

The other main strand of the film involves a relationship Poppy which develops with a social worker named Tim (Samuel Roukin). They meet at her school as a result of her attempt to help one of the children who is bullying another boy. Instead of melodrama, Leigh opts for funny, honest and touching scenes of being together and chatting about everyday things. Like everyone else, Tim has fallen for her too. The scenes at the school show that Poppy is a good teacher; when she sees trouble happening with the boy she reacts promptly and sensitively. In less capable hands it would be easy to turn her character into a loveable klutz or naïve ingénue, but scenes like this help to establish that Poppy has more depth and feeling going on under the surface than we have seen at first.

There are other scenes in the film, such as her encounter with a homeless man or her visit to her sister and brother-in-law which help to further establish Poppy’s depth and insight. She seems to have a fulfilling life, even in its simplicity – not in a glib or naïve way, but rather as a result of a conscious choice to be positive even in the face of life’s difficulties. Again, it is essential to state that she is not someone whose positive outlook masks an unwillingness to engage honestly with life’s difficulties. She knows how to be perceptive, serious or reflective when called for, but she also seems genuinely content to accept her identity as someone who deeply wants herself and others to be happy. Every scene in the film builds up a picture of a positive, good-hearted person, aware of the dark side of life, but determined to enjoy it anyway.

This development of the nuances of Poppy’s character is not only the strength of the film but also, in my view, the main point. Happy-Go-Lucky is a film about how we respond to the joys, fears, hopes and disappointments of daily life. And as bountiful as life is with all of these things, equally as bountiful are our possible responses to these circumstances, which help form our outlook on life. Indeed, most of the characters in the film could be said to reflect various responses to what life brings their way. For Scott, trying to create certainty in an uncertain world has led to a great deal of fear and contempt. This in turn has led to fear, anger, and living an alienated life. Even the flamenco instructor sees the beauty and passion of flamenco as a way of feeling assertive and powerful in the face of men who have treated her poorly. Flamenco gives her an outlet to feel strong in a non-threatening, almost therapeutic way, which then helps her form a view of life that stresses the need to stand up and assert herself against people who have harmed her.

Most of us, if we are honest, will admit that we sometimes look at the uncertainties and disappointments in the world and respond with various forms of fear and contempt. At other times, we feel like the difficulties in the world are too much, and we thus tend to oversimplify matters or look at life naïvely with rose-coloured glasses. What is so compelling about Poppy is that she finds a way to avoid both traps. Instead, she is able to view life in a beautifully redemptive manner. By saying ‘redemptive’, the implication is that for her there is an awareness of the brokenness of the world, but a brokenness which has the potential to be transformed into something good.

Poppy’s redemptive view of life (or what I shall call authentically positive) calls to mind the admonition of St. Paul in his letter to the church in Philippi: ‘And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honourable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise. Keep putting into practice all you learned and received from me – everything you heard from me and saw me doing. Then the God of peace will be with you.’ (Philippians 4:8-9, NLT). This admonition was often taught to me in very moralistic and behaviourist terms, i.e. get rid of impure thoughts and replace them with good ones. Or to put it even more simply: don’t think about the dark side of life; only think about the happy or positive side. I believe the character of Poppy invites us to consider this passage in a new light. It is not that Paul’s admonition is a call to deny acknowledging the difficult and painful things in life; rather, it is a call to face these things honestly, but in an authentically positive way.

The key to doing this, it would seem, is found in Paul’s last sentence – that the God of peace will be with us. There is no suggestion whatsoever in Happy-Go-Lucky that Poppy’s positive outlook on life was due to her embracing the peace of God amidst her life’s circumstances. In fact, it is my understanding that Mike Leigh is an atheist. It is interesting, however, that Poppy embodies this sense of peace – an authentically positive, hopeful outlook – as if it were a reality in her life, even if she doesn’t name it as such. Her view of life seems to be rooted in faith; not a faith in the goodness of people (the film makes a good effort not to enforce this view), but instead a faith in the ‘big picture’. Somehow, there is a faith and hope that there is good in the world, even in a world of pain, loss, betrayal and disappointment. Because of this, Poppy feels confident in her choice to enjoy life for what it offers, and in the process helps others to enjoy it a bit more too. Embracing this kind of authentically positive view of life is surely one of the ways the peace of God manifests itself, and it is demonstrated to great effect in this film.

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