British director Mike Leigh has made the first great comedy for our new depression. Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky tells the story of a sunny soul who lets her smile be her umbrella and sometimes her human pest repellent. It has a big-hearted optimism. It pays tribute to characters who hold on to their aplomb even in plummeting circumstances.
Leigh's heroine, Poppy (Sally Hawkins), has put together her life with an existential do-it-yourself kit. When you see her hopping bars with her roommate Zoe (the droll Alexis Zegerman) and her off-kilter younger sister Sally (the glorious Kate O'Flynn), she could be any working woman having a blast. And when you see her and Zoe in their flat making bird masks from paper bags, you don't know what she's up to. It turns out she's a schoolteacher, and a great one, whether she's using bird masks to excite kids about avian migration or pondering why a pleasant-looking boy turns violent.
Rather than resort to a conventional plot (he never does), Leigh structures the film like a giant, joyous "Getting to Know You" number. Early on, audiences may sympathize with a bookshop owner who keeps his distance from Poppy at her daffiest. Yet the way Hawkins plays her, with a brilliant combination of ebullience and mental energy, she's "cute" meaning attractive and "cute" meaning acute - and thus a potential heroine even when she comes off as a ditz.
Everything about this movie is primary in a good way, including the bold, bright colors and the values of imagination and creativity Poppy fosters in her primary school. Her cheerfulness is mostly authentic, at times also willed. She doesn't believe that if you smile the world smiles with you. But she knows that a smile can be renewing when the world or one of its sorrier creatures gets you down.
"Whatever gets you through the day" - now reduced to "whatever" - remains the catchphrase people use to express a placid acceptance of life. Leigh, and Poppy, would never employ that as a refrain or accept it as a motto. The point of her life is to embrace the day, not just get through it. She thinks everything deserves a human touch. Many a bohemian would try to cheer up a drooping plant or flower. Only Poppy can say, wistfully, of a stolen bicycle, "We didn't even get a chance to say goodbye."
