Several years ago, I can’t remember quite when, I saw Mike Leigh’s first work, Secrets & Lies (1996), and I was more than a little fascinated with how the movie felt. I didn’t see it in its original release, hence not knowing for sure when I saw it, but it felt different than most anything else I was seeing. It had a solid construction to it but a feeling of absolute looseness as well. It didn’t feel as free-flowing and stream of consciousness as a Robert Altman film but it didn’t feel as utterly standard as so much else either. Later, when I saw his extraordinary Topsy-Turvy (1999), I was hooked. Here was a director who gathered together his actors with an idea and story outline and worked for weeks with improvisations as a solid plot started to make itself known. In part because of that, his films never feel like they’re headed in any obvious direction, even if they headed towards something climactic. Later, I saw Happy Go Lucky (2008) and wasn’t disappointed. It’s reception at the end of the year, however, shocked me.
I saw Happy Go Lucky in the theater and right from the start, it had the Mike Leigh feeling all over it. The story doesn’t just take its time to develop, it doesn’t really develop at all. Mainly, like much of his work, it takes characters and begins to draw them in closely, examining deeper and deeper without ever really setting a story in motion. We meet Pauline, played by Sally Hawkins, as an extremely good-natured lady, and of course she goes by Poppy, not Pauline. It seems there is almost nothing that disheartens Poppy and the movie begins by showing this explicitly. Her bike is stolen and she doesn’t seem angered at all but does need transportation so decides to learn how to drive, bringing her in contact with Scott, a driving instructor played by Eddie Marsan in what was, to my mind, the best single performance of 2008, in any role.
The two characters, driving student and instructor, clash almost immediately except that Poppy doesn’t even notice they’re clashing. Her personality runs so counter to his brooding, grim outlook that she is amused by how down on everything he always is and tries her best to cheer him up or make him feel better every time she’s with him. Her behavior seems to make him angrier and, yet, it also seems to pull him in. It’s evident that few people have ever paid Scott much attention and the attention he gets from Poppy is more than he can handle. Of course, it’s the attention she gives everyone but he doesn’t know that. He must believe, somewhere in his mind, that he’s special and she has become attracted to him.
Before long, ominous signs begin to manifest. As Poppy comes home with a friend, she sees Scott on the corner, fixated on her flat. These signs, ominous to the audience, are of no matter at all to Poppy. He probably just likes her, she reasons, and is too shy to say anything. Later, during one of their drives, he denies having ever been there. As the movie progresses, and Poppy remains utterly oblivious to Scott’s demons, the movie takes on an unsettling effect that I have often felt equates to Alfred Hitchcock’s famous description of suspense as the bomb under the table. In that example, Hitchcock said that having two men talking about baseball and then a bomb suddenly goes off, may cause a shock to the audience but there is no suspense. However, if the audience knows there’s a bomb under the table, and the two men keep talking about baseball, there’s suspense. We shout at the screen, “Stop talking about baseball! There’s a bomb about to go off and kill you!” Will they discover it in time? Will they leave? Will they stay and die? Who knows? And that’s how Happy Go Lucky increasingly feels as you watch it: Poppy is the oblivious pair of characters discussing baseball and Scott is the bomb under the table. We can see it, she can’t. We can see Scott is simmering, then boiling, and ready to explode, and all she knows is she’s having a fun time driving.
When Happy Go Lucky was released, it received reviews in line with every other Leigh film. That is to say, they were exemplary. Sally Hawkins and Eddie Marsan were nominated and/or won in almost every competition, from the London Film Critics to the Los Angeles Film Critics to the New York Film Critics. There were the Golden Globes and the European Film Awards and the Berlin Film Festival. Most people pegged Hawkins and Marsan as front runners for the Oscars and then… nothing. Not even a nomination for either. Maybe the Hollywood set didn’t think they were “acting” because so much was improvised before hand. Who knows? What I do know is both of them were robbed. Oh, look, Marsan wouldn’t have won anyway, I get that. No one was beating Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight but, damn, not even a nomination? Oh well.
Mike Leigh forged ahead as he always does and produced more great work, like Another Year and the magnificent Mr. Turner. His films regularly produce outstanding performances and, yet, no one in Hollywood ever seems to notice. Timothy Spall, Jim Broadbent, Allan Corduner, Sally Hawkins and Eddie Marsan. Not a damn one of them, it seems, can do the best work of their careers and get anyone in Hollywood to even turn their head. It’s of no consequence, I realize that, but I wish I could be a little more happy go lucky about it. For now, I’ll just have to let my inner Scott simmer and hope that my inner Poppy rises to the occasion.
Greg Ferrara