Film

Her real name is Pauline (Hawkins), but everyone calls her Poppy, and no nickname could describe her better. A schoolteacher in London, Poppy possesses an Energizer Bunny enthusiasm for life; even a stolen bike can’t derail her optimistic outlook. She’s so relentlessly cheery that you might miss the telling moment when, discussing work with her best mate (Zegerman), Poppy admits that negligent parenting “makes me so angry.” A microflicker of rage appears before she snaps back to default mode; with one small expression, the actor reveals just how complex this little Ms. Sunshine is. Happiness is Poppy’s protective shell against the world. Without that aggressive glass-half-full attitude, she might be consumed by the tsunami of negativity washing upon her.

We take Mike Leigh’s gifts for granted, knowing the collaborative nature of his filmmaking will inevitably produce something brimming with humanity. Yet what the director and cast do with this character study is miraculous. Everything from a flamenco teacher’s breakdown to Poppy’s Naked-ish encounter with a vagrant offers sly, subtle revelations about this woman. The extraordinary Sally Hawkins earns every bit of the nearly unanimous praise she’s received to date, but Eddie Marsan’s ability to make a racist, sociopathic driving instructor sympathetic is equally amazing; spouting paranoid rants and compulsively shouting to check the mirrors, his anti-Poppy is clearly damaged. But Marsan doesn’t treat the character as the sum of his hatreds any more than his counterpart portrays hers as mindlessly happy. They’re as close to messy, multilayered human beings as cinema can produce. We should consider ourselves lucky to have met them.