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On Movies: 'Happy-Go-Lucky' is more than plucky

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: October 30, 2008 - British director Mike Leigh can fool you. While his best known movie, "Secrets and Lies," is about exactly what the title says it is about, some of his earlier films - such as "Life is Sweet" and "High Hopes" - are a lot darker than the words on the marquee suggest. So, I approached his newest film, "Happy-Go-Lucky," with some trepidation - was I about to watch a movie that would have been more accurately titled "Misery and Misfortune"?

The movie opens cheerily on that relative rarity, a sunny day in London, with traveling shots of the main character, a young woman with a smile as wide as the Thames, happily and aimlessly riding her bicycle through the city's winding streets. She sways to the accompaniment of the sort of lilting music that might signal that a small French circus has come to town.

The woman parks the bicycle and visits a bookstore, where she tries to cheer up a grumpy clerk who seems to have been spending too much time with Kafka and Beckett. She leaves the store and discovers that her bicycle has been stolen.

Bummer.

It's as if the young woman, whose name is Poppy, was Paul McCartney singing "Don't you know it's getting better, getting better all the time," with Mike Leigh as John Lennon interposing in gloomy counterpoint, "Couldn't get no worse."

Poppy shrugs off the loss of the bicycle and keeps on smiling, but the movie has just begun. What further torments, we wonder, is Leigh planning for Poppy as he turns her from an cheerful optimist to a misanthropic pessimist?

Leigh, indeed, has a few more unpleasant tricks up his sleeve, but Poppy, who is a teacher in a tough city school, perseveres. She stays happy, and she continues to think of herself as lucky as she goes through a series of adventures and misadventures. And in the end, it's hard for the viewer not to think Poppy is right: She is lucky, not so much in the mixture of small triumphs and disasters that dot her life, but in a cheerful outlook that makes her skip past the bad things and cherish the good ones, such as an encounter with an elegant, passionate Spanish woman who teaches flamenco to klutzy Brits, or a date that might lead to a relationship.

Sally Hawkins gives a remarkable performance as Poppy. There is great potential for irritation in a character who always looks on the bright side of things, who keeps smiling through her tears, but Hawkins makes the character, with her boyish lope and her colorful jumble of clothes, seem real and, in the main, likeable.

At the center of the movie are a series of driving lessons with an uptight instructor named Scott (Eddie Marsan, in an electrifying performance). Poppy is always interrupting Scott's very serious, my-way-or-the-highway instructions with flirtatious jokes and quips about people on the sidewalk. As the lessons progress, Scott gets angrier and angrier and reveals some deeply felt fascist tendencies.

In the end, almost reduced to tears of rage, Scott accuses Poppy leading him on sexually and of "celebrating chaos." Scott is a madman, or close to it, but some of the things he says about Poppy cut pretty close to the truth - charmed as we may be by Poppy, there are times when we might well wish she would just shut up for a bit and give it a rest.

I think Mike Leigh intended the ambiguity, wanted the audience to like Poppy but to understand that she could wear a person down with her eternal cheerfulness and her sometimes intrusive exaggerated friendliness. In a movie that is predominantly sweet and funny, he leaves us with a complicated reaction to a character who herself, at least on the surface, seems fairly simple. Opens Oct. 31.

'What Just Happened'

Hollywood loves to make movies about itself, and a few of them - "Sunset Blvd.," "The Bad and the Beautiful," "The Player" - are memorable, in part because they do not hesitate to slam the movie industry. "What Just Happened," directed by Barry Levinson from a memoir and script by producer Art Linson, isn't as good - or as mean -- as those classics, but it isn't bad, either.

"What Just Happened" is more satirical than scathing as it tells the story of a twice-divorced, multi-familied producer (Robert De Niro) who is trying to keep up with his complicated personal life while wrenching a movie out of a recalcitrant, egotistical star (Bruce Willis) and a punkish, foul-mouthed British director (Michael Wincott). The star refuses to shave off a ridiculous looking beard, and the director wants to end his violent flick by murdering not only the star, but the star's dog. The tough studio head (Catherine Keener, who is superb), senses disaster and is scheming to cut her losses.

Some of the movie, which was loosely based on real events during the filming of an Alec Baldwin movie called "The Edge," is very funny. Some of it, including the climax, is predictable. But the main problem is that the movie asks us to care about the fate of the affable but infinitely malleable producer, a man whose main job is to keep track of which way the wind from the studio is blowing and tack accordingly. He's too wishy washy to be either a hero or a villain, and he ends up mainly as a comic foil. Opens Oct. 31.

Harper Barnes
Harper Barnes' most recent book is Never Been A Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked The Civil Rights Movement