DEAR Austin,
This post is for you.
Austin posted a while back about his latest movie infatuation—Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky. Remarkably, after Austin rounded up a bunch of us to watch this movie with him, none of us liked it. At all. Even after learning that Rotten Tomatoes gives it a fresh rating of 93%.
Anyhow, I wanted to give Austin a couple of reasons why I didn’t like it, in the hopes that he might return with some comments and responses of his own. (Echoes of Slate. This should make Davey happy.)
First, in his original post Austin suggests that Poppy (the heroine) is a good guy character with depth. I’d like to disagree. Poppy certainly has “depth potential” (the fact that she’s always happy, the conundrum of such a crass person teaching pre-school), but the storyline never bothers to recognize any of her flaws. Driving Instructor Scott is doubtless a flawed person, but some of his instincts are right. Say, for example, when Poppy goofs around while driving and takes her hands off the wheel to flutter about. That’s wrong. That kind of “happiness” isn’t joyful. It’s foolish. Such a “happy-go-lucky” character offers many such tensions that could have been explored but weren’t.
Second, this movie could have easily been 30 minutes shorter. Gratuitous screen shots and dialogues abounded, serving only to communicate the lack of cohesive construction. (To put it another way, it felt like most of the conversation was throwaway, utter nonsense that served to reveal nothing—only fill time until one of Leigh’s philosophical insights had been properly setup. Sort of like a row of mud huts and shanties with a two-story house in the middle: guess what was supposed to look impressive?)
Third, I’m simply not convinced that Poppy had any foundation for her happiness. Blame my innate Schaeffer, but Poppy’s world has no meaning for happiness. She is shallow, merely trying to keep the peace (abundantly evident in two scenes: first, the bar scene with her two teaching friends where she never disagrees with either of them, despite the multiple contradictions; and second, in the family scene where her “responsible” sister is berating the rest of them). What does Poppy have to hang on to? One day, she too like Scott will blow up, and it won’t be pretty.