A missed opportunity, no musician for a full house. Maybe an obvious picturesque crowd-pleaser but I find no cause for suspicion. Bhutan took away citizenship from Nepalese-origin residents, our lead surveyor is in his forties and was born in Bhutan but can’t get a passport to follow his young girlfriend to Australia. Cute onscreen titles showing the happiness quotient of interviewees, then the movie goes in-depth with a trans woman and her mom who has cancer, a schoolgirl upset that her mother won’t stop drinking, a Very Happy man with three wives who like each other more than they like him, a widower who speaks only of his late wife until we see his newborn grandkid at the end. The crew (or the edit) returns to past interviewees, weaves their stories together instead of showing their happiness score and moving on, so when you finally see the calculations of someone whose full story you’ve heard, the quantifying seems absurd. We stayed with the Q&A, our second time seeing these filmmakers after The Next Guardian.
Tag: happiness
Happy-Go-Lucky (2008, Mike Leigh)
There’s a traffic jam on the movie-blog because I couldn’t think of anything to say about Happy-Go-Lucky. I liked it though! Katy kinda liked it too. Happy teacher Sally Hawkins tries to infect everyone around her with happiness, meets a stone wall in her paranoid, misanthropic driving instructor. There’s also trouble with an unresponsive store clerk, a mentally disturbed homeless man, her picture-perfect pregnant sister, and a young school bully with abuse issues at home. Through the kid Sally meets a cute boy, a child counselor with whom she goes boating at the end.
I don’t remember Sally Hawkins from Vera Drake. I don’t remember driving instructor Eddie Marsan from any of his eight movies I’ve seen in the last five years, poor guy. I’ll look out for him playing John Houseman in Linklater’s new movie.
People who called this movie the flipside to Leigh’s Naked were right on (though Leigh himself doesn’t think so). It’s one of the few movies I’ve seen theatrically lately which I would gladly watch again right now.
D. Denby: “Leigh surrounds her with a realistic social world—workplace, family, students, a variety of grumpy and dissatisfied people. She greets them all with such frothy benevolence that you fear for her. Yet the movie, shot on sunshiny, light-filled days, feels joyous and loose-limbed, and the audience learns to relax and go with it.”