Happy Go Lucky

Rain. Clouds. Cool weather. Resume writing. Job hunting. Our newly tightened budget. After days and days of this, we were looking desperately for something to cheer us up.
What we found was movies. Two movies, specifically.
And they did cheer us up. Just not for the reasons you'd think.
We depend on movies to transport us--however temporarily--from the problems we've dealt with all week. Usually this means letting Netflix send us whatever turns up at the top of the queue (What. You didn't think we could afford to go out to see them?)
A week ago, that didn't work out so well. We ended up with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (based on a true story about a guy whose stroke left him almost completely paralyzed but his mind intact. He had just enough time to blink his way through a book before he died.) And The Orphanage, a sad ghost story about love and revenge from beyond. It ends with a suicide.
So, yeah. We had to do better than that.

I went through the queue and found one called Happy Go Lucky. The synopsis said it was about an irrepressibly sunny elementary school teacher--and it was a comedy. Maybe it would give us a lift, I thought. Either way, I could write about it here.
Happy Go Lucky, directed by Mike Leigh, is about a perky, friendly 30-something woman named Poppy (Sally Hawkins) who lives in London. She always tries to see the bright side in everything. So when her bike is stolen she doesn't brood about it, as I probably would, but immediately signs up for driving lessons. Her teacher, Scott (Eddie Marsan) turns out to be a racist woman hater brimming with anger over perceived slights and conspiracy theories.
He ends up being attracted to her, but this doesn't go the usual Hollywood route. She never returns his interest and their relationship ends with his explosion of violent jealousy and her complete rejection.
This was billed as a comedy but it wasn't, in fact, funny. Not in the "ha, ha" way. There are no sight gags, no gross outs. Not even much clever dialogue that you'd be able to quote. The most humor came from Scott's non-stop rants during the driving lessons. And they were more "amusing" than funny.
So why did this cheer me up?
For one thing, it didn't make fun of the optimistic main character. A main character with a positive attitude in a movie who is not also a ditz or a buffoon is as rare as a main character who is super smart and also happy. Look at A Beautiful Mind (brainy main character succumbs to mental illness) or Phenomenon (John Travolta suddenly becomes brilliant only to find out it's because he's dying of a brain tumor.) It just doesn't happen. If you're an optimist in a movie, you're either a member of a cult or some kind of flim-flam man.
In fact, fear of being made fun of is one big reason I've avoided the whole positive attitude thing. So it was comforting to see that an optimist can be seen as a good person by people in the creative community.
It also left me feeling good because it was a movie with a female lead that didn't end up being all about men.
There aren't many movies like that. In fact, I can't think of any. Even The Women, the George Cukor classic from 1939 with an all-female cast is really all about women trying to steal husbands or win them back.
Happy Go Lucky is the movie Cukor should have made. There are a few men thrown in, but the biggest character, the driving instructor, is not that important to Poppy's life. She isn't really paying attention to him. And her new boyfriend, while handsome, is more of a walk-on.
Instead, the screen is dominated by women. Working. Drinking. Taking flamenco lessons. Living their lives. This is so rare in movies that at times, I found myself marveling at the higher general pitch of the dialogue for extended periods of time. Maybe there's hope for the movie industry yet.
But I do go on.
The other movie we saw was O Brother Where Art Thou? We've seen it before, of course, but it was on TV. Its depiction of the Great Depression made me feel downright rich. Hey, at least we don't live in backwoods Mississippi on a failing dirt farm.
Might as well sing about it.