In the past week or so it's been almost impossible to turn on the radio without hearing latest national treasure Mike Leigh speaking about his uncharacteristically optimistic new film, Happy-Go-Lucky. We saw it last week in a preview with a live Q&A with the director afterwards (only he was in London and we were in York and a satellite effected the link). But in all the fuss about the film I think something important has been missed.
We have been endlessly told that Poppy, on whom the film focuses (played by Sally Hawkins) is a model of positiveness and that we could all learn something from her. And while that might be true, she also makes it very difficult for anyone she encounters who doesn't want to share her relentless cheerfulness. When, early in the movie, she goes into a small bookshop and tries unsuccessfully to engage a staff member in conversation, I was reminded of Auden's ‘I have no gun but I can spit’. If she'd have gone up to the bookseller and playfully pinched his bottom, all right-thinking people would have agreed that she had trespassed into his personal space – but is personal space only physical? Don't we all have a right to some psychological personal space? If I want to be a miserable old git, don’t I have that right, so long as I don't impose my miserable old gitness intrusively on others? (message to my family: the question is rhetorical in this context).
The other key character in the film is a clearly damaged personality who works as a driving instructor. Poppy’s approach to life is as different to his as it is possible to be, and when the two approaches collide, it's he who comes off worst. I saw an interview with Sally Hawkins recently in which she spoke of the character she plays as "very sensitive". Oh no she isn't. If she was sensitive she wouldn't go around winding people up -- she would know when to shut up, and when not to impose her sunniness on someone else.
What, you will by now be asking, has this got to do with philanthropy or social justice? Well, there is a link, albeit a tenuous one. Before I spell it out, I want to say something about another experience last week -- we saw Northern Broadsides version of Romeo and Juliet (which would doubtless be advertised in the States as ‘William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet’) at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough on Saturday (after an excellent fish and chip supper at the Princess Café – that’s just to add colour, and has absolutely nothing to do with philanthropy).
The Friar, in his eagerness to help the young couple, and in his certainty that he knew what it was right to do for them, was the immediate architect of the ensuing tragedy. He, and Poppy, and many in the field of philanthropy -- there you are, I promised we’d get there -- seem to have a kind of unthinking confidence about what is good for others. Of course, sometimes they might be right -- but if they're wrong than the lesson of Happy-Go-Lucky and Romeo and Juliet (Mike Leigh, who I'm sure is an avid reader of this blog, will doubtless be delighted that the two works are written of in the same breath, so to speak) is that the consequences can be awful.
This, of course, is the importance of grant making for foundations. It's grant making, when done well, which ensures that foundations are listening to the people at the sharp end and if not to them directly, then to people who are close to them. Foundations interested in social justice need to be sure that they are pushing their resources in directions where they will do good and at least do no harm. That's one of the messages of Happy-Go-Lucky and Romeo and Juliet; it's just that Mike Leigh and Sally Hawkins haven't realised it yet - though Shakespeare, who realised all sorts of things centuries ahead of his time, probably did.
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