The cliché plot that typically surrounds crotchety old men involves the old grump softening and opening up about his past thanks to a small child or sweet, concerned woman. Such was the case for A Man Called Ove and countless others. What makes John Carroll Lynch’s Lucky stand out – aside from its cast of stellar supporting actors – is its disdain for a plot so pat. In its place, however, writers Logan Sparks and Drago Sumonja don’t choose to offer much of a plot at all. Lucky (perfectly played by the late Harry Dean Stanton, who passed away just a couple weeks shy of the film’s release) structures his life around a solid routine, and the film is content to follow along, the camera merely capturing Lucky’s deliberate, albeit slow, movements and conversations with others in the small desert town. It’s a passive experience in that Lynch prefers to show rather than tell. After all, unpacking a life’s worth of experiences, fear of impending death and stark loneliness isn’t an easy task.
Frequently clad in baggy white underwear, a tank top, a cowboy hat and boots, Lucky lives alone and seems to like it that way. Every day follows the same routine: a morning yoga practice, a cup of coffee and the crossword puzzle at a local diner, a visit to the store to buy a pack of cigarettes for the day, an afternoon stint watching TV game shows and a drink at the bar, supplemented by innocuous arguments with the regulars. In running all these errands, Lucky makes his way around town and, despite his curmudgeonly ways, people seem to more than tolerate him, they respect his curt and sour responses and even like him. Early on in the film, Lucky suddenly collapses at home, and the swift demise of our surly protagonist seems inevitable. But his doctor’s (Ed Begley Jr.) comment that Lucky is “ old and getting older” ends with the revelation that he’s seemingly in perfect health – and even trying to stop smoking would do more harm than good.
There are those, though, who attempt to change Lucky’s ways. The bar owner’s boyfriend, Paulie (James Darren), suggests ““Friendship is essential to the soul,” to which Lucky retorts that the soul doesn’t exist. When someone from the pet shelter tries to convince him to give a dog a “forever home,” Lucky scowls, “Nothing’s permanent.” While Lucky has no interest in engaging with conversations about aging and death, supporting characters infuse the film with philosophic discussions, yet none affect Lucky in any measurable way. Lucky instantly loathes a life insurance salesman (Ron Livingston) but listens intently when he shares the affecting story of his near-death experience. A fellow veteran at the bar likewise shares a haunting wartime story. Then there’s Lucky’s ostensible friend, Howard (David Lynch), whose tortoise President Roosevelt has run away, prompting the overly dramatic and, to Lucky, ridiculous statement “There are some things in this universe, ladies and gentlemen, that are bigger than all of us. And a tortoise is one of them!”
The absurd and existential share equal footing in Lucky, somehow converging into one of the most realistic films about aging and the inevitability of death. But to extract a clear message from the film seems counter to Lynch’s intention. Life and death are more complex than anything that can be distilled into 88 minutes, and Lucky opts to allow its audience to experience how one man goes about his life when it is so obviously nearing its end, rather than preach a mindset or a sense of peace. While the character of Lucky suits Stanton perfectly, his resistance to a cliché narrative does even more. Even though Lucky has regrets, his commitment to not dwelling on them or over-analyzing what’s to come doesn’t come across as a sense of peace or even denial, but a method that allows him to simply be and enjoy the time he has left. Hopefully Stanton felt the same.
The post Lucky appeared first on Spectrum Culture.