“Happy-Go-Lucky”: Life is Sweet

Admittedly, I went to see “Happy-Go-Lucky” as a diversion on the early evening of the most anticipated election night.  

As the film begins, Pauline ‘Poppy’ Cross (Sally Hawkins), the embodiment of the title, is shown riding her bicycle, helmetless, along London streets from Granby Place to Finsbury Park with a sweetly goofy smile creasing her face, and it quickly became easier to forget politics.  

The present-day story is quite straight-forward and carries a familiar tone for a Mike Leigh film; It’s not a tumultuous time in Poppy’s life — we follow the 30-year-old as she bops along to work, cavorts at a flamenco dance class, learns to drive and latterly embarks on a relationship — but the film captures wonderfully how Poppy embraces the prosaic earnestly and fully.  She is a primary school teacher of a multicultural class of 7 and 8-year-olds who seems to relish cutting, painting and clucking around in a chicken mask as much, if not more so, as the children do.  For the best part of a decade, Poppy, who dresses in outfits pinched from Pat Benatar’s “Love is a Battlefield” video, has lived with her acerbic flat mate and fellow teacher, Zoe (Alexis Zegerman).  Together they enjoy nights out at the disco with the girls but they’re not a frivolous duo and while they’re both seeking substantial relationships, there’s no self pitying in their bemoaning the lack of prospects. 

As befitting a Mike Leigh film, the movie isn’t skewed to the sweet side completely.  With her bike stolen, which she accepts with a good natured shrug, Poppy decides to learn to drive and engages the services of an instructor. Initially Scott (Eddie Marsan) appears to be a stern tutor but as the weekly lessons continue, he becomes increasingly vitriolic, especially when he bemoans a nation he perceives as under threat from the melting pot; he doesn’t see it as half-empty or half-full but overflowing. But Poppy is no dupe.  She mocks him with snarky asides, her sense of humor hardly disguising her growing unease with his small-minded nastiness. Yet, she does want to understand where his frothing anger comes from, why his Britain is not her Britain, how he despises the beauty she sees so clearly in her classroom, and the final lesson between the two is kinetic without being overwrought. 

In films such as “Life is Sweet” and “Secrets & Lies,“ Leigh has tamped the quotidian lives of ordinary people to unearth splendid insights into the human condition. Leigh orchestrates one of these moments in “Happy-Go-Lucky” when Zoe, Poppy and her incorrigible youngest sister (Kate O’Flynn) visit their married middle sister, Helen, smugly ensconced in suburbia, with her overmatched husband, Jamie (Oliver Maltman). Pregnant and insecure, Helen (Caroline Martin) goads and chides Poppy about family, children and mortgages, remonstrating that her older sister  can‘t be as cheerful as she purports to be.  Poppy delivers a heartfelt and assured defense.  The tension is heightened above a simmer but doesn’t explode, so that like so many family moments, Helen slinks off to bed in a sulk, the remaining unease as uncomfortable as a pull-out sofa sleeper.  

With an actress of less acumen and poise, Poppy may have devolved quickly into an insipid caricature. Luckily, Hawkins plays the part with ample integrity and intellect. She dispatches naiveté as Poppy’s cheeky, fun-loving persona is grounded in a conscientious and sensible ethic. Vitally, “Happy-Go-Lucky” is centered around this performance of exquisite bravura. 

A curmudgeon could balk at Poppy’s sunny disposition, her indefatigable spirit could be dismissed as twee, and her irresistible optimism could be condemned as unrealistic and childish, but when the film was over, and I stepped outside the theater, and the world had won, and it seemed like every face was plastered with a sweetly goofy smile, it was as though a planetful of Poppy’s had sprung up, each giddy with a good natured last laugh for the cynics.

“Sixty Six”: Betwixt & Between

“Sixty Six” is an overcooked Christmas cake. And director Paul Weiland allows his corpulent impulses to overwhelm what could have been a charming gem of a film. Coated in sticky-sweet icing but filled with darker themes,  the movie is so stuffed with competing ideas and tones that it regrettably collapses in on itself.

Bernie Rubens (Gregg Sulkin) is a North London lad in 1966 with the ignominious fate that his bar mitzvah could fall on the World Cup final day, which England, he hopes, won’t make. We first meet Bernie in a bittersweet scene as he’s picked last for his gym class football team. And if the film had been satisfied with this concise concept, a small but sincere story regarding a young man‘s anxious months-long journey towards his important day, “Sixty Six” had a chance to be special. But it throws in an obsessive compulsive, depressive dad (Eddie Marsan) who with his brother runs a fruit and veg shop which is under threat from a national competitor. And the drama keeps being heaped on, till the movie topples over from the weighty matters.  The project would have been well served by a more frugal Weiland tossing out several of the dramatic elements and reigning in writers Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan from their sweeping impulses. 

But Weiland suffers from a difficulty shifting between the serious and lightheaded.  Therefore, the switch between the joyful and sad moments just feels jumbled. It’s not as though people don’t wade through life with a plethora of tumultuous events but this film does it so jarringly that  the emotional see-saw feels exploitive.  At times, scenes seem plunked in for the sole reason that a very light moment must be followed quite suddenly by an intense one. The tragedy especially doesn’t feel connected to the basic story but instead tagged on to simply prompt an audience reaction.  It’s a scattershot approach which similarly bewitched a movie like “The Full Monty.”

The treatment of the father’s character is particularly perplexing  He’s more than simple quirky; he’s a troubled, damaged, and peculiar man. But the film treats his mental health like so many swings and roundabouts.  The father’s depressive malaise, which leads him to be hospitalized, can be brushed aside, the film appears to suggest, with a glorious extra time goal. Marsan does a commendable job with a character undermined by oversimplification.

In the final reel, the film dissolves into a scenario so soaked in fantasy it‘s laughable. Let’s just say that there’s not a chance in Hull City FC that the dad could have snagged tickets to that football match in the manner in which he does. The scene could have worked if Weiland had incorporated an airy, nostalgic mood throughout.  Plainly, it would have been a fitting resolution if the film had been steeped in a whimsical, fantastical tone from the onset. But, as presented in this film, the untenable ending is utter tosh.

The cast can’t be faulted for any of the film’s shortcomings.  Helen Bonham Carter is endearing against type as Bernie’s self-possessed mum.  Playing Bernie’s aunt, British comedienne Catherine Tate again proves that in roles outside of her own creation she is a genuine actress.  And Peter Serafinowicz, a tangential member of Simon Pegg’s comic entourage and a phenomenal mimic in his own right, provides a good natured turn as Bernie’s cheeky uncle. 

It’s disappointing to see a film like “Sixty Six” miss an opportunity, a sitter, really. Because along with the cast, there are highlights in the presentation as well.  Both the art and set direction by Lynne Huitson and Jille Azis are redolent with a Swinging London vibe. Rebecca Hale’s costume design is equally adept at capturing the more outrageous fashions of the time and the simplest of school uniforms.

There’s a better film here if Weiland had trimmed the excess.  Too bad there won’t be a second helping.