Lucky
John Carroll Lynch (2017)
The title character and the actor who plays him are inseparable to an exceptional degree. Lucky is a ninety-year-old man, in good physical and mental shape for his age but keenly aware of his mortality. He’s played by Harry Dean Stanton, who was ninety when the film was shot and who died in September 2017 (a few days before Lucky opened in American cinemas). Logan Sparks and Drago Sumonja, who wrote the screenplay, did more than write Lucky with Stanton in mind – they also incorporated elements of the actor’s life into the protagonist’s. Like Lucky, Stanton grew up in Kentucky, worked as a ship’s cook during World War II service with the US Navy, never married and was always a heavy smoker. (Lucky, at least, takes a matter of fact view of the risk that cigarettes could kill him: ‘If they could have, they would have,’ he says.) I gleaned these details from Stanton’s Wikipedia entry and other quickly accessible online information. Lucky may well contain other points of connection.
Stanton was quoted as follows in a Saturday Evening Post interview of 2013: ‘We’re not in charge of our lives and there are no answers to anything. It’s a divine mystery. Buddhism, Taoism, the Jewish Kabbalah – it’s all the same thing, but once it gets organized it’s over. You have to just accept everything’. His words sound like the inspiration for Lucky’s dictionary-assisted dictum that ‘Realism is the practice of accepting a situation as it is’; they may (or may not) mean Stanton didn’t share Lucky’s atheism, which is central to the film. After briefly collapsing at home, Lucky visits his doctor (Ed Begley Jr), who reminds the patient how exceptional he is: ‘You know, most people don’t get to where you are – never get to the moment you’re in right now, where you have the ability to witness what you’re going through and clearly examine it’. In other words, it’s great to reach ninety and still have all your marbles, except that it means facing approaching death without the arguable consolation of a foggy mind.
When Lucky has a dream about his mortality, it reflects not his exceptionality but the lack of imagination of the film he’s in: he approaches a dark, deserted building and stands fearfully beside an illuminated ‘exit’ sign. John Carroll Lynch, a familiar face in front of the camera, is making his directing debut here. As Lucky goes on, it gives the increasing impression of being not just a tribute to Harry Dean Stanton but excessively dependent on him – and, to a lesser extent, on David Lynch, with whom Stanton has regularly worked, and who plays Lucky’s drinking buddy Howard. The diner and watering hole Lucky visits daily and a few other details of the small-town setting – Piru, California – suggest typical Lynch territory and his presence seems designed to give John Carroll Lynch (no relation)’s movie the seal of approval. Howard owns a tortoise, even older than Lucky, called President Roosevelt, who has gone missing. It’s a relief that this strand of the story is entrusted to David Lynch, who plays Howard completely straight. Some of the other locals and plot incidents are not eccentric but twee – despite the efforts of a capable supporting cast that includes Tom Skerritt, Ron Livingston, Barry Shabaka Henley, Beth Grant, James Darren, Yvonne Huff and Bertila Damas.
The main character isn’t securely written – his philosophical eloquence comes and goes – and perhaps this is more of a problem because the scriptwriters and/or director were being fed material by Stanton. Yet the strength and purity of his acting, in their emotional effect, transcend this: he anchors and seems to integrate Lucky’s personality. As a commemoration of Stanton, Lucky is a valuable piece of cinema. The hero’s longevity isn’t down just to the smoking: he walks plenty, does five yoga exercises every morning, drinks plenty of milk. He moves surprisingly quickly – as does the tortoise, seen crossing the screen at the start and end of proceedings. ‘There are some things in this universe, ladies and gentlemen,’ declaims Howard in the bar, ‘that are bigger than all of us, and a tortoise is one of them’. Another are the giant desert cacti among which Lucky stands in the last and most visually powerful sequence of the film. Lucky looks up at them, awed and uncomprehending, before he and Harry Dean Stanton finally walk away from the camera and into the distance.
19 September 2018