Film

If you ran into the chronically upbeat, giggling Poppy (Hawkins) on the street, you might be tempted to walk to the other side. Leigh’s latest character study—his first to focus on a lone protagonist since his brilliant Naked (1993)—seems expressly designed to wear down viewers’ defenses: It sets you up to hate Poppy, then proceeds to peel back layers of her personality until there’s nothing left but admiration.

As a grade-school teacher with a childlike manner, Hawkins pulls off a difficult balancing act: Poppy is no Candide-like figure; she manages to see the glass half full without losing touch with reality. When it’s time to deal with a schoolyard bully, Poppy proves she can be compassionate in a lower key. (Her attempt to comfort an unstable homeless man, on the other hand, seems a bit too expressly designed to upend audience expectations.)

Having hit 30 without a clear life plan, Poppy doesn’t necessarily have conventional satisfaction. Indeed, it would be a mistake to take Poppy’s optimism for the movie’s own: A dance instructor, Poppy’s pregnant sister, and most significantly, Poppy’s volatile, racist driving instructor (Marsan) are all flustered in Poppy’s presence. To put it in terms that Leigh would no doubt find reductive, the film suggests that serial optimists have as much capacity to drive the world nuts as to improve it.