GOOD FORTUNE
Directing: C+
Acting: B-
Writing: C
Cinematography: B
Editing: B
Good Fortune is, unfortunately. a textbook case of the best parts of a movie having been in the trailer. Admittedly part of my problem is how often I go to the movies, and therefore how often I sit through the same trailers over and over again—something the average moviegoer does not contend with. The rest of the audience at the movie today laughed at several moments where I had to stop myself from thinking: why are they laughing? This bit is overplayed! But, most of them weren’t even remembering what they saw in the trailer.
Still, the script for Good Fortune is undeniably lacking, and it’s the weakest part of the production. This is not great, since the script is arguably the most critical part of a movie’s success. Sometimes great performances elevate mediocre material, but that doesn’t quite happen here, even though the cast is stacked with either deeply talented people, bona fide stars, or in many cases both: Keanu Reeves is the angel Gabriel, who gets out over his skis when he leaves his assignment of saving people from texting-and-driving accidents to save what he sees as a “lost soul.” Sandra Oh appears as Gabriel’s boss, Martha, in a sort of heaven middle-management. Keke Palmer plays a working-class woman trying to organize her hardware store coworkers into a union. Seth Rogen is Jeff, a wealthy entrepreneur oblivious to how good he really has it.
It pains me to say this, because I like Aziz Ansari and his work, but he’s the weak link in all of this. Not only does he play the part of Arj, the lost soul Gabriel has decided to save, without any sense of true dedication to the craft, but he also wrote and directed this film—his first time doing so with a feature. He doesn’t particularly excel at any of these three jobs. I find myself wondering if he might have done better just doing one of them and not the other two. Would his performance have improved with a different director? Could he have polished the script if not starring in the film had given him more time? He stacked all the supporting parts, so he clearly could have cast a better actor as the lead. Good Fortune could have worked a whole lot better if Ansari had just picked a lane.
To be fair, there are auteurs out there who have succeeded at being this very kind of triple-threat. Ansari just isn’t one of them. His Netflix series, Master of None, was very well written, and his performance in it was fine. Good Fortune, though, is presented and billed as a really fun comedy. At best it’s a slight amusement. I got one truly good laugh out of its 97-minute runtime.
And I do rather like the premise, a sort of It’s a Wonderful Life except it’s not Christmas, and instead of showing a depressed man how the world would be if he had never been born, this angel takes a more misguided approach and decides to show Arj what would be missing from his life if he were given the life of the rich dude, Jeff (Rogen), he’s been working for. Jeff is thus switched into Arj’s life, and at first he doesn’t realize it, until a peculiar plot point has Gabriel giving Jeff all his previous memories but not yet his old life. It gets a little convoluted, where these two can only switch back if Arj actually wants it and can see that it’s a life worth living. Who made these arbitrarily strict rules, anyway? These angels are assholes.
Keke Palmer’s Elena is Arj’s love interest, and she’s the only character in the film with a truly grounded sense of the worth of a working-class life. This comes to a head when the rich-version Arj woos Elena, and she’s taken by it at first, but then pulls back when Arj proves to be out of touch. This is all fairly predictable, and that might even have been easily overlooked if the movie were actually funny.
The biggest problem I have with Good Fortune, really, is its point of view. Ansari seems to be congratulating himself for how much he understands the struggles of working-class people, all while still managing to come across as out of touch himself. It’s worth noting that Aziz Ansari reportedly has a net worth of $25 million. The thing is, rich people don’t think of themselves as rich if they know other people who are far richer than they are, and all we have to do here is consider that Seth Rogen reportedly has a net worth of $80 million and Keanu Reeves $380 million. Compared to Reeves, Rogen’s fortune is chump change, and compared to Rogen, Ansari is the “little guy.” I’m not sure he’s fully thought through how most people watching this movie have a tiny fraction of what even he has, or that his movie could have benefited from a pass on the script by someone much closer to the lives he’s depicting.
He does showcase a very diverse cast of characters here, I’ll give him that—right down to the Latino restaurant owner with a thick accent. It’s likely not an accident that the only principal characters who are White are the rich ones (and yes, we know, there are White poor people too). The thing is, none of these characters are very interesting. I probably never would have thought of this myself, and I wish I did, but I’ll have to borrow this from the observation made by the friend I saw the movie with: every single character could have been more interesting, with minimal effort. So why aren’t they?
I kind of liked Gabriel, I’ll admit. There’s something endearing about Keanu Reeves delivering the line “I’m a dumb dumb.” Reeves is perfectly cast as a “budget angel” with a kind of hapless incompetence. This guy never had the greatest range as an actor, but he’s still a star—so much so that Ansari wrote into the script that at least two people comment openly on how hot they think he is. There are even plenty of circumstances that should be more of a blast to watch, such as when Gabriel tastes some mushroom chocolate. But that scenario, as in all of them here, just leads to a whole lot of not much, which is maybe the best way to describe this movie.
Keanu Reeves puts his hand on Seth Rogen’s shoulder, and suddenly Rogen realizes this movie isn’t very good.
Overall: C+