3 months ago
23
Good Fortune
★★½
M. 97 minutes
Aziz Ansari has the voice of a cartoon duck, big eyes equally well-suited to mournfulness and freaking out, and a persona that blends self-effacement and entitlement in the manner of vintage Adam Sandler, without matching Sandler’s ruthless determination to please the public.
Aziz Ansari and Keanu Reeves in Good Fortune.Credit: AP
In sitcoms he’s winning enough, but being pleasant isn’t enough to make you a movie star. Not that comedians get to be movie stars anyway in today’s Hollywood: even Sandler’s recent vehicles have mostly been relegated to Netflix.
Good Fortune, which Ansari wrote, directed and produced, is a mildly subversive fable about the yearning for big-time success – and also the kind of medium-budget comedy that used to be common in cinemas, but nowadays only exists because someone like Ansari has enough TV clout to bring it into being.
He stars as Arj, a would-be documentary film editor in Los Angeles, in between gigs and barely getting by on his income from odd jobs sourced through an app akin to AirTasker. His luck improves, up to a point, when he talks his way into a job as an assistant to Jeff (Seth Rogen), a pampered tech investor whose life consists of floating in his pool, long lunches charged to his company, and the occasional ayahuasca journey.
When Arj and Jeff part ways, Arj winds up even more depressed than before, until a none-too-bright angel named Gabriel, played by Keanu Reeves, steps in with a plan to turn things around. Suddenly, Arj finds himself living in Jeff’s mansion, with Jeff as a humble servant at his beck and call.
The plan is that Arj will learn that a life of privilege has its drawbacks, although that isn’t exactly how it works out. In fact, the character who learns the most from the situation is Gabriel, who loses his wings and has to get a job washing dishes, in between discovering the simple joys of human existence such as milkshakes and tacos.
The innocent fish out of water is an ancient comedy premise, but Reeves’ ideally earnest delivery yields most of the biggest laughs – though the script disappointingly backs away from the promise of showing us what it might be like for an angel to go on a drug trip or have sex.
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The message about class is also softened by the end (unlike its 1980s precursor Trading Places, this isn’t explicitly a film about race, though it’s hard to miss that Jeff inhabits a much whiter world than Arj does). There are no real villains, and Keke Palmer as Arj’s politically conscious love interest Elena remains so far down in the film’s own hierarchy she’s barely allowed to be funny.
Still, the script has some ingenious touches, like Jeff’s enthusiasm for “cold plunges”, where he alternates between an ice bath and a sauna. The metaphor is obvious: when the characters shift between extremes of wealth and poverty, this can similarly be viewed as therapeutic. Alas, it’s not a course of treatment widely available in reality, or not in this life.
In cinemas from Thursday
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