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I said that this is going to be a vivacious, positive, intelligent, bright woman with a great sense of humor and buzzing with energy, and the film really needs to take its cue from that.
Which in fact it does do, and yet the question lingers—not whether Poppy is a “good thing” or that more of us “ought to be like her,” like the unsinkable Molly Brown or Doris Day out on a Beverly Hills lark, but whether anyone so eerily … excuse me, “sunnily” predisposed is even motivationally credible. Because if we assume we’re all necessarily the sum of influences and forces and psychological vectors that go into making up our character, like an intractable physics problem that theoretically has a solution but practically speaking doesn’t, then how to account for Poppy’s existence at all? What’s she missing that the rest of us unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) aren’t and how does she manage to escape the twin curses of self-knowledge and critical awareness? (Which Leigh maintains she doesn’t, but let’s continue anyway … ) Because the “optimism,” if that’s what it is, seems very much a cultivated product, not anything inborn, the result of a more or less intentional screening out. “Reality, can’t have any of that,” Poppy says at one point in a bookstall, which I’d say definitively lets the cat out of the bag.
