Happy-Go-Lucky in the UK.

"Happy-Go-Lucky has been extravagantly admired since it premiered at the Berlin film festival earlier this year, and I find myself liking it more and more," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "Mike Leigh's trademarked cartoony dialogue, as ever lending a neo-Dickensian compression and intensity to the proceedings, is an acquired taste and I have gladly acquired it, though some haven't."

"Sally Hawkins is a real delight in Mike Leigh's new film as Poppy, a 30-year-old Londoner with a bubbly nature and an ever-present laugh that teeters between lovable and annoying," writes Dave Calhoun in Time Out. "The trick that Leigh and Hawkins finally pull off so cleverly by the end of Happy-Go-Lucky is that we're entirely in cahoots with her. Poppy is a mirror to us all: if we find her blind optimism and sunny nature hard to swallow, perhaps there's something wrong with us instead?"

Updated through 4/22.

"Make no mistake, Poppy is annoying," declares Kevin Maher in the London Times. "[S]he threatens to alienate any prospective audience that is expecting either the bittersweet miserablist poetry of traditional Mike Leigh movies (Vera Drake, Secrets & Lies) or just a protagonist whom you don't want to slap.... Of course, it's not the done thing to criticise Leigh, who is, alongside Ken Loach, one of the revered godfathers of the British film industry.... Happy-Go-Lucky, may be an attempt to save a 21st-century world that's heading towards disaster, but it's also a testament to the old Leigh foibles." Maher also profiles Eddie Marsan.

"Advance word (not to mention the title's unsubtle hint) suggested this film would show a chirpier Leigh than the man behind Vera Drake and All or Nothing," writes Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman. "But the most superficially upbeat parts - Poppy larking around with her chums or trading nonsensical small talk on a first date - are the least convincing, as cosmetically wacky in tone as 1993's Naked was artificially doom-laden." Poppy "is a pleasant enough lass, but two hours in her company is pushing it."

The Evening Standard's Derek Malcolm can't get anywhere with Leigh's critics: "It's no use telling them that most of his sad films are funny, and that most of his funny ones have a serious core - like this one. It is also one of his most fluent works, light on its feet, supremely well cast and acted and a portrait of a particular north London milieu that's well-nigh unbeatable for accuracy."

"Leigh's stock-in-trade may be sweet, wry melancholy, and he has carved out his niche with stories of working-class people dealing with pain, rejection and hopelessly elusive ambitions," writes the Telegraph's David Gritten. "But he has declared that in Happy-Go-Lucky he set out to make an 'anti-miserabilist' film. He and his cinematographer Dick Pope plumped for an expansive, widescreen approach, using different film stock to make London - and life itself - seem brighter."

"Happy-Go-Lucky is Mike Leigh's sunniest film, though some way short of his best," writes Anthony Quinn in the Independent. "Aside from the driving instructor's waxing fury, it lacks strong dramatic propulsion, especially in its first half. Perhaps that is the director's point, that life simply bowls along in its largely eventless way, sometimes funny and charming, more often not. But film - art - has an advantage over life in being able to select and discriminate; that's how it takes on shape and meaning. There's not much evidence of either here."

Hawkins profiles: Stephen Applebaum (Independent), Maddy Costa (Guardian) and Amy Raphael (Telegraph).

Leigh profiles: Nick Curtis (Evening Standard), Rebecca Davies (New Statesman), Sheila Johnston (Telegraph) and Jonathan Romney (Independent).

Online browsing tip. Time Out hosts "a gallery of Leigh's London places."

Online listening tips. The Observer's Jason Solomons talks with Leigh; then with Hawkins and Marsan.

Earlier: Ray Pride pulls together a dossier on Leigh.

Updates, 4/21: "Happy-Go-Lucky is as funny, serious, life-affirming and beautifully performed as anything Leigh has done, but with a lightness of touch only previously found in his Gilbert and Sullivan movie, Topsy-Turvy," writes Philip French in the Observer. And it takes place "in a colourful, yet very real London. It's a cheerful, likable place, but Leigh, working for the first time, I think, in widescreen, doesn't visit those fashionable locations that have recently been so popular with British and visiting American moviemakers. There's no Tate Modern, no walk past Lord Foster's Gherkin (though, inevitably, it's seen from a great distance), no London Eye, no Tower Bridge, no romantic excursion to Primrose Hill or Hampstead Heath."

Guardian readers chime in.

Update, 4/22: Sarfaraz Manzoor has an onstage talk with Leigh for the Guardian.

Posted by dwhudson at April 18, 2008 4:36 AM