In Contention

Tag: Topsy-Turvy

  • ‘Happy’ season for Miramax?

    I’ve been meaning to write about Mike Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Lucky” ever since I saw it some three weeks ago, but I haven’t found a window until now. I’m off to Berlin on the weekend and I’d really like to get this off my plate before I leave, so amid all the packing, I thought I’d hammer out some brief thoughts.

    I’m never really let down by a Leigh film. Even his lesser efforts seem to exist on some simple but probing level that makes argument a fool’s errand. More often than not, his work sparks appreciation during the awards season, and he even managed a second Best Director nomination for “Vera Drake” in 2004, which surprised more than a few people.

    “All or Nothing” was one of my absolute favorite gems of 2002, yet it was ignored completely, while going back to the epic year in cinema that was 1999, we find perhaps Leigh’s most ambitious effort in “Topsy-Turvy.” Then, of course, there was “Secrets & Lies,” which captured the hearts of many in an Oscar year dominated by independent film.

    Leigh’s pre-“Secrets & Lies” work is a slightly different breed, but still fundamentally the work of the same artist and, at times, the same vision of the world. And he has come back to it with “Happy-Go-Lucky,” the shrewd observation of which Guy made in his April review of the film.

    Something feels even more off-the-cuff about “Happy” than Leigh’s recent films. There is an even greater sense of spontaneity and improvisation lurking between the frames that can be both exciting and off-putting, but the purpose is served throughout: bringing the audience into the devil may care world of a woman hell-bent on saving the drama for your mama.

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  • REVIEW: “Happy-Go-Lucky” (***)

    The common line in the British press so far on “Happy-Go-Lucky,” Mike Leigh’s alternately fascinating and frustrating new film, is that it’s a departure for him — an exuberant comic revelation following the spare, precise despair of “All or Nothing” and “Vera Drake.” How quickly we forget.

    Only nine years ago, Leigh gave us the similarly punctuated “Topsy-Turvy,” a period romp that in some moments rivalled “Shakespeare in Love” for broad music-hall humour. Even his biggest crossover hit, the 1996 Best Picture Oscar nominee “Secrets & Lies,” had a much more explicit comic tone than many seem to recall.

    However, the most accurate precedents for “Happy-Go-Lucky” date farther back still: the film is not so much a new direction for Leigh as a throwback to the gentle character-oriented comedy and wispy, free-form narrative of his breakthrough features “High Hopes” and “Life is Sweet.” It’s a welcome move. As immaculately crafted and performed as “Vera Drake” was, it didn’t, for me, play to Leigh’s strengths as a writer: his witty ear for vernacular language and his preoccupation with the tensions and absurdities inherent in everyday conversation.

    These qualities re-emerge with a vengeance in “Happy-Go-Lucky,” a film bursting with rapid-fire banter, cathartic outbursts and occasionally didactic speechifying. The inimitably fluid language of London’s multicultural, multi-class population is woven through the film’s every exchange; if Leigh could snag a Best Original Screenplay nomination for a film as comparatively underwritten as “Vera Drake,” it’s difficult to see him getting passed over for this.

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