Happy-Go-Lucky.

"After extended cameos in two previous [Mike] Leigh films (as a resourceful pop tart in All or Nothing and the date-raped rich girl in Vera Drake), fine-boned Sally Hawkins shoulders the burden of every scene as the most relentlessly upbeat 30-year-old kindergarten teacher ever to bicycle London's chartered streets." J Hoberman in the Voice: "The blithe spirit who animates Happy-Go-Lucky is a priestess of positive polarization; she's either irritating or endearing—whichever you find her, you have to wonder why.... Will this lighthearted creature fulfill her earthly mission? At the very least, the spectacle of Poppy's devotion and desire, not to mention her all-around sunny disposish, left this viewer feeling unaccountably happy - at least for the moment."

Updated through 10/14.

"Disregarding dramatic convention, Leigh refuses to show her as broken or incomplete, in need of a course correction or good man," notes Eric Hynes at indieWIRE. "Casually, quietly feminist, Happy-Go-Lucky, is the Anglo working-class girl's answer to Sex and the City.... Stealthy-smart, PJ Harvey-sexy, supernaturally expressive, and several disarming steps ahead of everyone else, Hawkins's full-bodied singularity calls to mind none other than the queen of mesmerizing overdrive, Gena Rowlands."

"The movie is not an argument for chaos; it's an argument for making one's way through life with a relaxed will and an open heart," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "The optimism is exploratory, not programmatic; Leigh is no flower child. The only trouble with his scheme is that he has counterposed free-spiritedness and paralyzed moralism as mutually exclusive states, and there has to be something else—something like Leigh's film itself, which knows how to play easily within a firm over-all structure. Happy-Go-Lucky is triumphant proof that a creative middle way is always possible."

"What really sets Happy-Go-Lucky in motion is good old-fashioned chatter, from Poppy and those who cross her path," writes Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine. "It's as entertaining as comic patter in a Cockney radio skit, but the verbal energy, the volubility, also feels immediate and intimate. And alive, like Poppy's eyepoppingly patterned and colored clothes, or the film's unfussy street scenes."

"The thought of spending two hours with a relentlessly upbeat person in real life, much less in a movie theater, can be daunting, but Hawkins gives us a woman who's more than just a collection of turn-that-frown-upside-down clichés," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "Indeed, playing someone sunny without making them totally irritating might be more of a challenge than portraying Lady Macbeth, and Hawkins makes Poppy's good cheer pragmatic and personable."

"The necessary tension that propels the film comes from watching the jaded, humbled characters that usually populate Leigh's world as they try to make sense of Poppy," writes Lena Dunham in the Cinema Echo Chamber. "Is she mocking them? What in the world does she have to feel so good about? The answer: Nothing. She lives a decidedly average life. But in Poppy's book that makes her 'a very lucky girl.' When closely considered this statement becomes political, an indictment of the greed and undeserved ennui of the average citizen. But Leigh is far too skilled a craftsman to allow his message to read as pedantic."

This is "Mike Leigh's best, most complete work yet," writes Noah Forrest, who explains at Movie City News why it's taken him a while to come around to Leigh.

Erika Abeel talks with Leigh for indieWIRE.

Sam Adams profiles Hawkins for the Los Angeles Times.

Online viewing tip. Kevin Lee has video from the NYFF press conference and a Q&A.

Earlier: Reviews from the UK and Toronto and New York.

Update: "If there is anything brilliant in Happy-Go-Lucky, it is this: Leigh's film forces us to take a position on Poppy's behavior - to either judge her for her naiveté or to release ourselves to her optimistic, radiant good nature," writes Chris Wisniewski in Reverse Shot. The film "rises and falls on its central character. And thanks to a remarkable actress and a writer-director who gives her just enough room to pull back, Happy-Go-Lucky is, for all its flaws, quite lovely indeed."

Updates, 10/9: Poppy "is the greatest single character in a Mike Leigh film since Johnny, the well-read misogynistic punk in Naked," finds Armond White in the New York Press.

Kevin Kelly meets Leigh for the Austin Chronicle and finds that he "pines for a larger budget. 'I'm very keen to do a film about JMW Turner, the great English painter who, without his knowing it, was the father of impressionism. But I've made 18 full-length films, and nobody's interfered with any of them." A claim hard for most other directors to make."

Poppy "is a wondrous creation, thoroughly uncloying and so deeply imagined by Leigh regular Sally Hawkins that you feel she must go on existing somewhere even after the movie's over," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "The trouble is that the movie in which Poppy does, in fact, exist never quite rises to her level. The questions that Poppy poses by her irrepressibility 0 is it enough to find flashes of joy in a cruel and unjust world? how much compassion do we owe to our fellow human beings, even when those human beings treat us like crap? - remain not just unanswered (questions that big can't and shouldn't be answered) but largely unaddressed."

Updates, 10/10: "Nobody mounts a soapbox or whistles 'The Internationale' in Happy-Go-Lucky, but the film is so closely tuned to the pulse of communal life, to the rhythms of how people work, play and struggle together, it captures the larger picture along with the smaller," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Like Poppy, the bright focus of this expansive, moving film, Mr Leigh isn't one to go it alone.... Movies sometimes seem made for misery, for rivers of tears, stormy skies and third-act woe. Happiness is for suckers and Disney Inc. But happiness is a complicated, difficult matter, and in Happy-Go-Lucky it's also a question of faith."

"We take Mike Leigh's gifts for granted, knowing the collaborative nature of his filmmaking will inevitably produce something brimming with humanity," writes David Fear in Time Out New York. "Yet what the director and cast do with this character study is miraculous."

Salon's Stephanie Zacharek finds here "a picture so seemingly light that it might be hours (or even days) before you realize how deep and rich it really is.... This is a movie about hitting the groove of everyday life and, nearly miraculously, getting music out of it."

"Leigh is deft with this material," writes Richard Schickel in Time. "He does not linger long with it, yet his sketches of urban life have an unsentimental firmness and fineness about them. Still, for all his good nature and for all of Hawkins's energy, Happy-Go-Lucky did not play for me as a comedy. Its true subject seems to be anger. Call it deflected anger - a rage that is turned aside not solely by Poppy's relentless good cheer but by the fact that beneath her manner she is a sensible manager of relationships that are often on the verge of going out of control."

"In the end, Happy-Go-Lucky isn't saying anything far-reaching about this modern world and how it corrupts the innocent," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "It's just an exercise in conflicting personalities, that constantly asks, 'Who would you rather be?'"

Online listening tip. In conjunction with the Museum of the Moving Image's Weekend with Mike Leigh (October 18 and 19), Leigh's a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

"Happy-Go-Lucky is a disarming film, which evolves from a seemingly structureless character-study into a subtly taut story about friendship, teaching, patience, love, and joy. The film slowly accumulates gravity and dimension, and by the ending it becomes clear that Poppy's unflinching hopefulness is an active choice and a product of internal strength, not naiveté." James Ponsoldt talks with Leigh for Filmmaker.

Update, 10/11: "It's easy to take a reductive view of Mike Leigh's latest, Happy-Go-Lucky, not least because of its deceptively colorful, light-hearted surface," writes Keith Uhlich at UGO. "I've never considered Leigh much of a visual stylist, but his widescreen work here with frequent cinematographer Dick Pope is extraordinary - it's opened my eyes, truth be told, and makes me think I've been looking at Leigh's prior efforts through a dismissively off-kilter prism. But this is the power of great art: it expands our senses, illuminating the dark, unengaged areas of body and soul. For this if nothing else (and there's plenty else), Happy-Go-Lucky is a major work."

Updates, 10/13: "Some critics have deemed Happy-Go-Lucky the closest Mike Leigh will ever get to a 'feel good' movie," notes Sarah Silver in Stop Smiling. "Strangely, though, most of his films could technically be categorized as such, since his characters typically achieve some degree of redemption and spiritual growth by film's end. It's just that, until now, the murkiness of the moral and psychological quagmire from which his characters eventually emerge has been so dark that it tends to overpower the hopeful ending."

"Hawkins is so effervescent that after the film ended, I worried about her - it must have been sad to have to leave Poppy behind," writes David Edelstein in New York. "I'd like to think Poppy will never go away, that we all can cultivate our inner Poppys."

Updates, 10/14: "When the film works, Hawkins and Marsan bring a real conviction and intensity to their performances, but Poppy and Scott are never quite convincing as three-dimensional people," writes Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "Their happiness and anger seem to exist in quotations, and the sharp dichotomy between their personalities - one entirely optimistic, the other a vortex of negation - is facile."

"Trust Leigh, professional miserablist, to present such a thorny yet most deceptively simple view of happiness - that, basic needs taken care of, many of us are in the luxurious position of having it be a choice," writes Alison Willmore.

Posted by dwhudson at October 8, 2008 1:15 PM