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Lucky
***
Dir: John Carroll Lynch
Starring: Harry Dean Stanton, David Lynch, Ron Livingston
(USA, 15, 1hr 28mins)
“Harry Dean Stanton is Lucky” go the opening credits. He maintained a smoking habit until his death last year at the ripe old age of 91, so there’s certainly some truth to that. In this, his last feature role before his passing, he plays more or less himself, a crotchety old man pottering around his small Arizona town, following the same routine day by day. It starts with stretches in the morning, then a coffee at a diner, followed by a long day’s worth of solving crossword puzzles and watching game shows, before a quiet drink down the bar with his friend Harold (played with winning charm by none other than David Lynch, no relation to the director), who is pining for his missing tortoise. The basic structure repeats a handful of times throughout Lucky.
The great critic Roger Ebert once coined the Stanton-Walsh Rule of movies, which states that no film featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in however small a role can be altogether bad. It surely follows then, that any film in which Stanton or Walsh are the leads must be exponentially better. That is certainly the case with Paris, Texas – which remains the crowning moment of Stanton’s career (or of anyone else’s, frankly). Lucky is awowedly conscious of that film, being set in a similar lonely desert setting, and there are plenty of shoutouts to many of Stanton’s other films; Tom Skerritt, whom Stanton worked with in Alien, appears in one scene for example.
For the most part, Lucky is a darkly-humorous rumination on aging and the basic fact of being near to death. The most dramatic thing that happens in the film is Stanton falling down in the morning and visiting the doctor, who informs him that there seems to be nothing wrong with him and he is extraordinarily healthy for a nonagenarian. Stanton looks mildly annoyed that he is “okay”, and the event sparks a day of anxiety for the man, before he calms back down into his routine the next day. Lucky is tailor-made for Stanton. The film makes great use of his gloriously-aged hangdog face and the character’s worldview very much mirrors that of Stanton’s own as expressed in interviews, that life is just a passage from one phase to the next and that there’s not much you can do in the meantime but fill up your time and enjoy yourself.
There are a couple of corny monologues sprinkled throughout, where the film wishes to inform its viewers of “the point”. These aren’t fully successful despite the best will of the actors involved. Even at less than 90 minutes, the film feels slight at times, and there are a few redundant scenes that feel padded out. Despite this, John Carroll Lynch’s directorial debut is finely handled. He has long been one of those stalwarts of American character acting – the kind where you always go “I know that face from somewhere, but what’s the name….” – much like Stanton himself, and he’s clearly made an actor’s film.
Of course, when you have an actor of the stature of Harry Dean Stanton in that film, it’s hardly likely to be a dud.
words Fedor Tot