Arts & Entertainment

Habonim Spirit

Experience in Labor Zionist youth movement
influences director's work in Happy-Go-Lucky.

Naomi Pfefferman

Jewish Journal of Greater L.A.

D

irector Mike Leigh may be known
as a bit of a curmudgeon, but he
refuses to see his new film, Happy-
Go-Lucky, which revolves around a relent-
lessly optimistic teacher, as a departure.
The 65-year-old British writer-direc-
tor is famous for gritty realism in mov-
ies such as Naked, about a strangely
metaphysical angry young man, and Vera
Drake, about a 1950s illegal abortionist,
for which he received one of his five Oscar
nominations. He's also known for working
without a script, instead encouraging his
actors to improvise.
Leigh has little patience for critics
who marvel about Happy-Go-Lucky as "a
change of pace" for the director. "Rubbish,"
he says. "This movie has all the elements
of a 'Mike Leigh' film because I cannot get
away from making a Mike Leigh film. All
my work combines a balance between the
humorous and the pathetic"
He says he traces this point of view
to his Jewish upbringing in Manchester,
England, though he now leads a secular
life and eschews organized religion.
The idea for Happy-Go-Lucky began
when Leigh was pondering the gloom-

and-doom atmosphere after Sept. 11.
"I thought, (Now's the time to make an
"anti-miserablist" film about people who
are living their lives and getting on with
it," he says.
The main character, Poppy (Sally
Hawkins), gets on with her life even as she
encounters a seething driving instructor
(Eddie Marsan), who eventually stalks her;
a mentally ill transient; a bullying student;
and her dour sisters.
"She is an optimistic character, but
more importantly, she is a 'positivist:"
Leigh explains. "Poppy is someone who
looks things in the eye, who deals with
difficult matters as they arise, who is
open and nonjudgmental. She cares and
is motivated by her love for people ... but
none of these things in a soppy, sloppy or
sentimental way:'
Leigh's Yiddish-speaking paternal
grandfather was born Meyer Lieberman
(later Anglicized to "Leigh") in what is
now Belarus and arrived in England as
"part of the great Jewish emigration west:'
the director says.
Leigh's physician father and midwife
mother met through Habonim, the Labor
Zionist youth movement, in 1936. Mike
Leigh, in turn, became a Habonim leader
and traveled with the group to Israel on

a ship as a teenager. The experience had
a dramatic effect on his future work as
an artist: "The atmosphere was one of
chevrah, of sharing, openness and coming
together — of making things happen by
colluding — which describes the spirit
of how I work with actors and the atmo-
sphere of my rehearsals."
But when Leigh returned to the United
Kingdom, his overriding goal was to
immerse himself in the theater. While
attending the Royal Academy of Dramatic
Art, he played down his background to
escape being stereotyped. "I walked away
from the Jewish world at 17 — I couldn't
waif,' he says.
His work, as filmmaker and play-
wright, has always seemed to be about
Englishness, so it came as a shock to some
when his comedy-drama, Two Thousand
Years, which opened at the National
Theatre in London in 2005, revolved
around members of a Labor Zionist family
as they argued about the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict and what it means to be Jewish.
"Here's my Jewish play:' he wrote in his
introduction to the published script. "I've
been threatening to do it for years, but I
haven't felt ready until now."
Leigh used the opportunity to reflect
upon his upbringing and his disappoint-

Mike Leigh

ment with Israel and its policies. Leigh
says he selected only Jewish actors for Two
Thousand Years so they could bring their
personal experiences to the table.
Critics were so surprised by the play's
content that headlines referred to the
author's Jewish background as Mike
Leigh's "secret."
"It was like, 'Hey, he was a closet Yid;
which is nonsense',' the director says with
a laugh.
These days, he has a dual take on his
heritage: "I am fundamentally upset by
religion; I think it's deeply unhealthy;' he
says."I'm a totally spiritual person but
entirely unreligious. But I have Jewish
roots; I am Jewish, and that's why I dealt
with it in Two Thousand Years. And indeed
there is an unquestionably tragicomic
dimension to my work, which it would
be disingenuous to not own up to being
pretty Jewish."

❑

The film Happy-Go-Lucky, rated
R, is scheduled to open in early
November. Check your local movie
listings.

w s

Nate Bloom

WNW

Special to the Jewish News

Nobel Hebrews

Since the Nobel Prizes began in
0) 1901, 23 percent of them have
wit gone to Jews, including 2008's
Jewish Nobel Prize
Laureates – Paul
Krugman, 55, and
Martin Chalfie, 61.
Krugman, the
winner of the Nobel
in economics, is a
Princeton University
professor, a New
Paul Krugman
York Times colum-
nist and a frequent TV news guest.
Chalfie, a neurobiologist, head of
the biology department at Columbia
University and the grandson of
Russian Jewish immigrants, was
raised in Skokie, Ill., where he was
a high-school friend of H. Robert

CI)

C14

October 23 • 2008

Horvitz, the co-win-

ner of the 2002
Nobel in medicine.
Chalfie went on to
Harvard, where he
was captain of the
varsity swim team.
He shared the Nobel
Martin Chalfie
Prize for chemistry
with two others for
their work with a natural green fluo-
rescent protein that glows and allows
researchers to illuminate tumor cells,
trace toxins and monitor genes.

Film Notes

Rachel Getting Married, directed

by Jonathan Demme and opening
Friday, Oct. 24, tells of sisters Rachel
(Rosemary De Witt) and Kym (Anne
Hathaway), members of a secular
Jewish dysfunctional family that
comes together for Rachel's nuptials.
Debra Winger, 53, plays the sisters'

emotionally fragile mother. Rachel is
marrying an African American man,
and the sisters' father is remarried to
an African American woman.
Rachel was written by former
actress Jenny Lumet, 41, the daugh-
ter of Oscar-winning Jewish film
director Sidney Lumet, 84, and his
ex-wife African American journalist
Gail Jones Lumet Buckley, the daugh-
ter of legendary black singer Lena
Horne. Sidney Lumet had one other
child with Gail Jones, sound editor
Amy Lumet, Jenny's sister. Horne, 91,
is the widow of Jewish film conduc-
tor-arranger Lenny Hayton, an MGM
top gun in his own heyday. However,
Buckley is Horne's daughter with her
first husband, an African American.
In a recent newspaper profile,
Jenny Lumet noted that her grand-
parents and parents raised many eye-
brows when they entered into inter-
racial marriages. But, Jenny says,

societal attitudes have changed, and
she didn't feel it was even necessary
to raise the issues of race/religion
in Rachel. It is "post-racial" in its
sensibility. Jenny Lumet's current
husband, Alex Weinstein, is, as she
puts it, "a nice Jewish boy," and the
couple just had a baby.
Opening last Friday were W and

The Secret Life of Bees.
W is Oliver Stone's take on the life
of George W. Bush. Richard Dreyfuss

chews up some scenery as Dick
Cheney, and Elizabeth Banks plays
Laura Bush.
In Bees, Oscar-nominated British
actress Sophie Okonedo plays one
of a trio of South Carolina African-
American beekeeping sisters who
take in an abused teenage white
girl (Dakota Fanning). Okonedo was
raised Jewish by her English Jewish
mother (her Nigerian father returned
to Africa shortly after her birth).

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