Pages tagged “happy-go-lucky”

With award season in full swing, Milk and Wall-E have proven to be be the big winners on both sides of the coast. The New York Film Critics Circle named the Gus Van Sant-directed drama as its best film, while the Los Angeles Film Critics Association went for Pixar's latest opus.

There's a surprisingly gargantuan Internet faction dedicated to predicting who will be up for film's most coveted prize, the Academy Award. Publications like Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Entertainment Weekly, Los Angeles Times and New York Times all have Oscar blogs that obsessively trail the fluctuations in buzz amongst the year's top films. That's not to mention stand-alone sites like Awards Daily and In Contention, or well-known bloggers like Jeff Wells, Dave Poland and Anne Thompson. Even Roger Ebert has devoted a wealth of recent ink on the subject. But, the truth is, no matter how much someone knows, it's still just a wild guessing game.

Release Date: Oct. 10
Director/
Writer: Mike Leigh
Cinematographer: Dick Pope
Starring: Sally Hawkins, Eddie Marsan, Alexis Zegerman
Studio/Run Time: 
Miramax, 118 mins.

Much happiness, some luck, mild charm

In Happy-Go-Lucky, Poppy (Sally Hawkins) makes her own charmed life in London, following a trail of giggles between a stolen bike, a disturbed driving instructor, bookstore clerks, nights spent partying with her flatmate, and most other situations that might arise for a single 30-year-old woman. Like Audrey Tautou's Amélie remodeled for extroversion and erased of an interior monologue (and an external dream world, for that matter), Hawkins is charming—to a degree. Though she moves through Mike Leigh's film with grace, she rarely seems to arrive anywhere. She learns to drive, but literally has no destination in mind. There are laughs, of course, but where there is drama—mostly via bottled-up driving instructor Scott (Eddie Marsan) and one of Poppy’s young students—it rarely comes with any depth. Eventually, we find Poppy, but she’s already found herself a half-dozen times by then anyway.