Happy Go Lucky
Tuesday, December 30th, 2008
Sally Hawkins in Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky
If you haven’t seen the new Mike Leigh film “Happy Go Lucky” don’t read this blog post, go out and see the movie. Also, if you haven’t seen Charlie Kaufmann’s “Synechdoche” go out and see that, too. I’d recommend seeing the Kaufmann film before the Leigh film.
In any case, Happy Go Lucky, for me at least, raised an interesting philosophical question. It also acts as a good foil for Kaufmann’s somewhat bleaker statement about life’s ultimate futility.
As I was watching Happy Go Lucky I found myself remembering feelings evoked by some of Leigh’s earlier movies. The driving instructor spewing vehement, paranoid rancor reminds me of the vehement, paranoid character in Naked, for instance. But Leigh’s dramatic point of view has broadened and shifted, well, dramatically, over the years. Once roiling with seething, unremitting anger and misery, his preferred outlook in Happy Go Lucky is decidedly positive.
Leigh’s embrace of the positive fascinates me philosophically because it doesn’t exclude the negative.
Sally Hawkins’ character, Poppy, chooses to remain happy, positive and joyous in the face of misery, anger, and negativity. She doesn’t ignore life’s hardships, she allows them in, tries to work with them. In fact, she seeks them out, stays with them. Again and again we see Poppy engaging with troubled characters, trying to coax them out of their dark shells, or to shed some light in there.
Life is, to some extent, how we look at it, Leigh says. Someone steals our bike; do we let it ruin our day, or do we express a little mischievous regret that we didn’t get a chance to say goodbye?
Abandoned Warehouse
Bad things happen to people through no fault of their own, of course. Terrible things. Things that can’t be recovered from. But there’s no harm in trying to shed light, to help people, as Poppy’s character points out. And many of us allow ourselves to be unhappy about things that aren’t really terrible or unrecoverable.
Kaufmann reminds us that each moment is infinitessimally brief, unrecoverable, irrelevant. Leigh gently counters that each moment is enormous, inescapable, and joyous.