HAPPY-GO-LUCKY

Dir. Mike Leigh | U.K.| 118 min.| 2008 | Comedy - Drama
with Sally Hawkins, Alexis Zegerman, Elliot Cowan

When we talk about movie masterpieces, what usually come to mind are epic works that wow us with their scale, pictures that spring from grand ambitions and even grander budgets. But it takes more than ambition, and more than money, to make an intimate masterpiece like Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, a picture so seemingly light that it might be hours (or even days) before you realize how deep and rich it really is.

Made in characteristic Leigh fashion - instead of following a strict script, the actors develop the characters through improvisational sessions - Happy-Go-Lucky has no plot to speak of. Whatever story there is develops as a result of our deepening connection with the lead character, an unceasingly optimistic North London primary-school teacher named Poppy (Sally Hawkins), whose cheerfulness isn't a way of hiding from a chaotic, sometimes hostile world but a means of facing it.

Leigh sets himself up for failure right there: Who wants to see movies about happy people? Misery, stress and confusion are the stuff of dramatic tension. But Leigh and his actors work mysterious magic in Happy-Go-Lucky. This is a movie about hitting the groove of everyday life and, nearly miraculously, getting music out of it.

(Salon)

*2008 Golden Globe Award - Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy

“Happy-Go-Lucky won’t break your heart—it will make it soar. Leigh and Hawkins have created one of the screen’s most indelible and courageous characters in recent memory.”  - Washington Post

“Mike Leigh’s funniest film since Life is Sweet….Hawkins breezes in on her bicycle and engages our deepest sympathy.” - Roger Ebert

View the Trailer