Character portrait of a singular person, a primary-school teacher called Poppy, almost dementedly upbeat, seeing it as her mission in life to spread sunshine and joy wherever she goes. A tipsy giggler, a babbling fount of inanities (“Here we go, gigolo”), a constant commenter (“Never been here before,” she announces to no one in particular on her tour of a bookshop; “Don’t want to go there,” she reacts upon pulling The Road to Reality off the shelf), an avocational clown, a tireless self-amuser, she’s the nearest thing to Pee-wee Herman you could ever hope to find in a realistic context. (Is it significant that her bicycle gets stolen right off the bat? Unlike Pee-wee, she sighingly lets it go — “I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye” — and signs up for driving lessons.) The context, however, demands that she once in a while drop the good cheer in order to handle crises with her ranting, racist, rigid driving instructor (“It’s not easy being you, ay?”), a violent bully at school, and an addled tramp in the street. She’s not a one-note character. She can rise to the occasion, and there is always, even at the best of times, an underpinning of thin ice. Sally Hawkins, who had worked with writer-director Mike Leigh previously in Vera Drake and All or Nothing, takes total possession of the role, or vice versa, indelibly visualized in a neo- or retro-Flower Child wardrobe, too youthful by a decade, too loud by a hundred decibels, of clashing colors and multiple layers (a last layer, revealed on the chiropractor’s table, of pink bra and orange panties beneath black fishnet hose), and a full range of mirth from lopsided grin, pulling to the right, to open-wide glee. Leigh himself, you might have noticed, especially if you saw either of the samples mentioned above, is not the jolliest sort of fellow, and it would be easy to imagine him making a movie in which the central character were the volcanic driving instructor — the stalwart Eddie Marsan, who also appeared in Vera Drake — and in which the bubbly driving student were only one of several supporting characters, a movie, that is to say, more like his Naked, a portrait of a negativist. Any viewer less effervescent than Poppy, in any event, will be inclined to look at her as a kind of scientific specimen, to be observed with curiosity and wonder — along with unscientific amusement and a silent prayer of thanks she’s not living next door or coming over for dinner — in a somewhat amorphous and arbitrary succession of scenes, situations, circumstances. At all times the movie boasts beautiful bright color, rather as if Leigh’s regular cameraman, Dick Pope, had emptied a bottle of Windex on our window on the world. (Ah, we can see!) And please don’t propose that this is meant to be expressive of Poppy’s Weltanschauung. Clear bright colors ought not to be the exclusive privilege of the Pollyanna. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd