Bubbly Poppy Cross can’t be slowed down, shut up or upset. She’s a font of positivity, an energy cannon flattening everyone around her with relentless, exhausting musketballs of pure, thoughtless, giggly joy. She’s obnoxious as hell. For the first twenty minutes of the movie, or so. And then, suddenly, she’s charismatic, thoughtful, strong and intuitive.
This is apparently how director Mike Leigh wanted audiences to experience Poppy – he has said that he wanted to create a character that was incredibly irritating at first pass, but then managed to win audiences back over, to become sympathetic. A tough challenge, and a risky one, particularly as those predisposed to dislike Happy-Go-Lucky (as I, for some reason, was) are likely to be sold on a first impression, but given the critical acclaim this movie has garnered pretty much across the boards, Leigh seems to have pulled it off. At any rate, he did with me – I loved this movie.
Poppy (the perfect Sally Hawkins) is a kindergarten teacher, who lives with her best friend and long-term roommate, and divides her time pretty equally between work and play. She has an older sister with a persecution complex, and a younger sister who’s rather whiny. At the beginning of the movie, Poppy’s bike is stolen, so she decides to get her driver’s license. To this end, she employs a private driving instructor, Scott (the perfect Eddie Marsan), a racist, sexist, paranoid, didactic, insane ball of fury, and this odd couple spends a great deal of the movie in the tiny interior of a car, pushing each other’s buttons. Scott’s constant fury and long pseudo-philosophical rants on proper behavior and life outlook are both fascinating and incredibly grating, just as Poppy’s constant puns, bits and asides, giggles, snorts and squeals are both charming and incredibly tiresome.
The movie doesn’t have a great deal of plot, although a lot happens in it. Poppy takes her driving lessons, dabbles in flamenco dancing, worries about an abused student, and begins dating the dorky but sweet social worker she calls in to deal with same. While Poppy’s forced cheerfulness initially seems a self-involved way of needling others into paying attention to her, it turns out to be a resilient way of dealing with difficult or worrisome people – she is able to work closely with people most of us would avoid, and can approach them without fear, because her irrepressible spirit enables her to maintain her equilibrium in the face of verbal abuse. Even Poppy has her limits, however, and eventually we see where they are.
Positivity has taken a beating recently – there was Eric Wilson’s Against Happiness, which I didn’t think much of, and now Barbara Ehrenreich has a new book out, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, which is probably pretty good. And while I agree that many times, urging a good attitude toward a shit situation is a way of manipulating people who might otherwise cause some trouble into tapdancing in their fetters, on the other hand, irrepressible cheeriness can be a source of great personal power. People with Poppy’s personality make good teachers, social workers, rehabilitation workers, counselors and mothers, and the ability to withstand a constant barrage of at best depressing and at worst heartbreaking people and behaviors is an essential skill for those who perform such important social functions. Undoubtedly, however, every last one of these people eventually must define their own line of just how much of someone’s shit they can be expected to take before giving up on them.
