When first you encounter Pauline “Poppy” Cross (Hawkins), the unstoppable life force at the center of Leigh’s aptly titled Happy-Go-Lucky, it’s hard not to flinch and retreat a little, so relentless and overpowering is her good cheer. What makes her initially off-putting isn’t just that she’s bubbly, outgoing and inquisitive nearly to the point of mania. It’s more that she seems almost autistically oblivious to the contrasting moods of others, prodding people repeatedly to engage with her no matter how pointedly sullen or monosyllabic their response. Only as the film progresses, and we witness Poppy in a variety of contexts—at her job teaching grade-school children (with whom she’s predictably fabulous), dancing with her mates at nightclubs, doing battle with a dyspeptic driving instructor (Marsan)—that we get a sense of the genuinely warm, decent and surprisingly sharp-minded woman Poppy really is.

The Details

Happy-Go-Lucky

Sally Hawkins, Eddie Marsan, Alexis Zegerman

Directed by Mike Leigh

Rated R

Opens Friday, November 7

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Beyond the Weekly

Happy-Go-Lucky

IMDb: Happy-Go-Lucky

Rotten Tomatoes: Happy-Go-Lucky

Which, for better and worse, is Happy-Go-Lucky’s rather blunt point. For the entirety of his lengthy career—which includes such marvelous films as Life Is Sweet, Naked, Secrets & Lies and Topsy-Turvy—British director Mike Leigh has employed the same unique working method, assembling a group of gifted actors with whom he wants to work and conducting many weeks of improvisations from which he ultimately fashions a shooting script. The lead performances in Leigh’s films are reliably amazing, and Hawkins is no exception; she turns joie de vivre into something downright hallucinatory, as if Poppy had natural stimulants flowing through her veins. But this is the first of Leigh’s movies that seems expressly designed to demonstrate a predetermined thesis, rather than simply to explore various offbeat facets of human behavior. There’s something a wee bit dictatorial about its evident desire to make us reconsider that first distasteful reaction to Poppy’s nonstop chipperness. Ultimately, it’s little more than a sustained, virtuosic “Gotcha!”