We at The Playlist usually put up our Oscar picks by now. Or at least if you go by last year (rather than predictions outright, it’s more of taking the temperature of the consensus). It’s been a weird year and December still feels like the month were the locks or easy-to-pick contenders will appear.
However, if someone had to ask us now about one of our favorite performances of the year, coming to mind is definitely Eddie Marsan and his spectacularly neurotic turn in Mike Leigh’s “Happy Go Lucky.”
Yes, it’s Sally Hawkins as the pathologically effervescent protagonist Poppy, that’s getting all the headlines, but if she gets an Oscar nomination (which it looks like she might), Marsan is no less deserving and possibly more-so.
In the refreshingly un-dour Leigh film, (his normally make you want to slit your wrists; though this one is almost too chipper initially), Marsan plays Scott, Poppy’s ill-tempered and dogmatic driving lessons instructor. Tightly-wound and monumentally repressed, with each driving instruction lesson Scott becomes more and more impatient, than incensed and then a frightening pot of boiling internalized rage that spills over aggressively.
The character — fleshed out by Marsan himself as most Mike Leigh actors do in rigorous, six-to-seven month rehearsal sessions prior to shooting — is a full on obsessive nutter: a conspiracy theorist, a racist, a misogynist, and someone who staunchly believes America is a Satanic, masonic project.
Throughout his anal-retentive and almost-despotic lessons, he teaches Poppy his cardinal rule: En Rah Ha! A very odd, three-tiered Satanist mantra about the “all seeing eye,” that Scott uses as a metaphor for the triangular vision in one’s car — the rear-view mirror and the left and right side mirrors. “En Ra Hah!” Scott incessantly barks at Poppy as a constant reminder to check her triangular perspective which will assure driver-road safety. Does it sounds psychotic? Well, that’s because it basically is.
It’s a performance that’s at once outrageously hilarious and stop-on-a dime, chilling and disconcerting. Later in the film, we see Scott near Poppy’s house in a weird, may-or-may-not-be stalking her moment. Hhis full-tilt mad dash in the opposite direction is probably the funniest moment in a film in 2008; but it’s also one that is scary and sad in its own right – kind of like the many shades and nuances of his performance — he’s always making you feel a mix of amusement, pity and terror.
To call Scott repressed is probably the understatement of the year. His internalizations are subterranean and one would probably shudder should they get a glimpse of his true, deeply-buried psyche, simultaneously fragile and frail and imminently combustible.
It is largely due to his character that “Happy Go Lucky” doesn’t simply ride away happy on Poppy’s kooky wavelength. The scene when he finally calls her out on her bullshit is illuminating to her character. She’s not perfect and both characters are such extremes. He’s the antithesis of Poppy and challenges not only her driving skills but her outlook on life.
It really is a tour de force performance, so let’s officially start the campaign right here: Eddie Marsan deserves at least an Oscar nomination for his Best Supporting Role as, Scott, the most psychologically unhinged and fucked up driver behind the wheel since Travis Bickle.
