Review of Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) by Jordanp — 09 Apr 2011

Through a mis-click I accidentally gave Mike Leigh's 'Another Year' a zero score when it deserved perhaps a 3. This one, however deserves the zero I'm giving it. One reviewer asks whether it's possible to enjoy the company of the world's most irritating woman, yet somehow finds the room to say 'yes'. I can't imagine why. Not only are half her lines made up of jokes that aren't actually infused with anything approaching wit, but she punctuates EVERY SENTENCE with this inhaled half-giggle -- perhaps a gasp-laugh -- that made me eventually put the sound off. I would have to ask whether it's possible to enjoy a movie that also has absolutely no plot. The plot is an incidental background upon which 'real life' plays out in all its unedited glory. Why did Leigh leave us watching school teachers making paper masks for their next day's class for A-G-E-S? Did he take a comfort break with the camera still running, and then decide to just leave it in? There is sort-of a climax towards the end, but it is merely a rare hot-point in one of the story-threads that comes out of nowhere, rather than a moment of resolution. At two hours, this movie runs for at least 45 minutes too long.

The main character is meant to appear happy, and perhaps she is what passes for it in Manchester. She seems rather to be a ditsy dullard who lollops around in a haze of tired slang detritus and blips of half-one-liners, blindly committed to not giving a care about what anyone else requires of her. She is endlessly bubbly, but (except for her three scenes of near-compassion on which this aimless movie seems to hinge) she achieves this veneer of cheerfulness by acting resolutely in her own interest, as though happiness is merely a matter of allowing nothing to faze you and allowing nothing to make demands of you.

As with Another Year, Mike Leigh seems to be examining a theme about which he knows very little. The treatment of happiness and 'message' (which is too strong a word for any conclusions one might draw) are clumsy and poorly analysed. The director's commitment to filming 'Real Life TM' comes across as muddled, paceless, lazy film-making, and all of this might not have mattered too much if the characters were engaging. Making them annoying instead of charming was a directorial risk that is hard to justify, and it continues to mystify me that none of this seems to have mattered to the majority of critics.

The director wants to show us real people doing real things, with messy unresolved real-life events, and not the neat, cliched Hollywood climax and denouement. I wonder why we should bother going to the cinema for that. A desperately abysmal film, among the worst I've ever seen.