Review of Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) by Mason B — 23 Aug 2014

If you had pulled me out Happy-Go-Lucky fifty minutes in and asked me what I thought about it, I would have said that I didn't like it. At that point I had found it unfunny, and I had thought that the main character was kind of insufferable.

I know that the point of the character was that she was always happy, but a character needs more depth than that, and she was also remarkably over quirky. I was thinking that film was just going to be about an overtly happy women going through her life with comedic bits added in.

Then the film truly surprised me. It started to go into far darker and more poignant territory. It started to put Sally Hawkins character into more realistic and more human situations, and showed how her constantly happy character stood up in the face of anger and human misery.

And Sally Hawkins is absolutely brilliant in the bits where her cheery attitude is put to the test. So the fascinating thing here is that while I never found the film funny nor did I stop finding the lead character annoying, I still very much liked the film.

It's the first of Mike Leigh's films that I've seen and I'm very interested to see more of his filmography. Happy-Go-Lucky is a comedy that I didn't think was very funny; but I still liked the film and found it very interesting.