Movie Review: Lucky

Lucky **** ½ / *****

Directed by: John Carroll Lynch.

Written by: Logan Sparks & Drago Sumonja.

Starring: Harry Dean Stanton (Lucky), David Lynch (Howard), Ron Livingston (Bobby Lawrence), Ed Begley Jr. (Dr. Christian Kneedler), Tom Skerritt (Fred), Beth Grant (Elaine), James Darren (Paulie), Barry Shabaka Henley (Joe), Yvonne Huff (Loretta), Hugo Armstrong (Vincent), Bertila Damas (Bibi), Ana Mercedes (Victoria), Sarah Cook (Debbie), Amy Claire (Frances).

 

Lucky is one of those perfect storms of a movie that really shouldn’t work as well as it does, yet somehow ends up being just about perfect for what it is. In Harry Dean Stanton, it casts the only actor you could play the lead role this well, and lets him deliver a stunning, final performance at the age of 89 (when the film was shot) – and released just weeks after his death at the age of 91. Stanton was one of those character actors who you saw in a million different movies – yet other than his brilliant work in Wim Wenders masterpiece Paris, Texas (1984) never really in a leading role. Yet he was always great in whatever role he was cast in. Normally, Stanton was cast as a man who had seen some things – and while didn’t much talk about them, it warped him in one way or another (often, in terrible ways).

 

The same is true for his role in Lucky, in which he plays the title character – a 90 year old atheist who walks around his small hometown, a creature of routine. He goes to the same coffee shops to do his crossword puzzle, and bullshit the cook and waitress, the same convenience store for his OJ and cigarettes, goes home to watch his game shows, and then at nights, head to the bar for a Bloody Mary – and more BS with his friends there, including Howard (Stanton’s real life friend and frequent director David Lynch) – who is worried about his missing turtle.

 

In a way, everyone in town knows Lucky, and yet no one really does. He has outlived all his contemporaries, has never been married, has no children – and miraculously, still has all his faculties in place. When he goes to his doctor (Ed Begley Jr.) because he fell down, he cannot find anything wrong with him – and essentially tells Lucky that at his age, if heart disease or cancer hasn’t killed him yet, it ain’t going to. He’ll likely die soon because he’s 90 – not because he gets sick. Some people may well find comfort in religion at this point – but Lucky is an avowed atheist. Lucky puts on a good show at being the tough, old timey crank – but underneath that, he really doesn’t know what to expect. He has two conversations – with people significantly younger than he – where he confesses some of those fears – but doesn’t quite know what else to do with them. In the film’s most striking sequence, Lucky is by himself at night, shivering and alone as Johnny Cash’s I See a Darkness plays. The sequence is almost the film in a microcosm.

 

The film was directed by John Carroll Lynch – another great character actor, making his directorial debut. I don’t know why he was chosen to direct – and yet oddly, he was the right choice. He never tries to push anything in the movie – doesn’t attempt to do too much, to interfere with Stanton and the rest of the cast – and yet, intuitively, makes the right directing choices. The film probably sounds like any number of Sundance films you see a year – a dramedy, filled with quirky characters, and life lessons, and in many ways, I suppose that is precisely what the film is. And yet, there is something deeply touching, and even profound about the film. Roger Ebert once wrote about Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru that it is the film he would watch the die he found out he was dying. That is as good a choice as any – and I don’t know if I can pay Lucky a higher compliment than to say that it would be another great choice.