**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Eric Bana, Drew Barrymore, Robert Duvall, Debra Messing
screenplay by Eric Roth & Curtis Hanson
directed by Curtis Hanson
by Walter Chaw Trapped in the doldrums between Robert Duvall doing his elderly, patting people on the hand while he's talking bit and Drew Barrymore enunciating every word as though she's trying not to let the marble fall out, Eric Bana struggles against stardom once again but states a case for it just the same. The vehicle this time is Curtis Hanson's Lucky You, a mainstream poker picture that re-establishes Hanson as a less ambitious James L. Brooks (which isn't altogether a bad thing). Bana is compulsive gambler Huck Cheever, named after an American writer and an antiquated term for a wheeler/dealer, thus neatly encapsulating his character as not only a con-man and a bit of an asshole but also moony and eloquent. There's nothing at all surprising about the way the film moves towards its conclusion, and even its twist loses its lustre beneath the steady drone of its interiors. It's an un-ironic love story featuring a problem gambler, a girl fresh off the bus, and a father/son subplot packing all the subtlety of a heart attack–which makes it, of course, suddenly Pollyannaish when it yearns so mightily for world-weary. Lucky You looks like a gambler, but it acts like a diagram instead of a train accident.
The MacGuffin is the World Series of Poker, which requires a ten-thousand-dollar buy-in that Huck gets, loses, gets, loses, gets, loses, and (spoiler) gets. Huck's gifted, but in a tagline-ready character précis, he lives his life (tight) like he should play his cards and plays his cards (loose) like he should live his life. The various hosts for his parasitic schemes and panhandling include Horatio Sanz as a guy who likes to offer carrots to desperate people for completing ridiculous tasks under rigid deadlines and Charles Martin Smith as a millionaire something or another who wants a piece of Huck's action. Then there's the estranged father (Duvall) who taught the kid everything he knows, leading to a sometimes-painful bit about the dead mother's wedding band that the two use in an escalating emotional blind.
And then there's the scene on top of a hotel on the Vegas strip where Huck and Billie decide to love one another, and for a few minutes, all is forgiven. That's the frustration of Hanson's films, in that even at their worst (see also: 8 Mile), they're not without redemptive moments; and all the while, the spectre of what Hanson could do with more focus and less bullshit (see also: In Her Shoes) looms over it like a broken promise. A quick cameo by Robert Downey Jr. as a man earning his living at a deserted bar answering a rainbow of cell phones connected to 1-900 helplines hints at the real loneliness of Hanson's world: a rich, murky well Hanson only really tapped whole-hog in L.A. Confidential, though it lurks in the background of each of his pictures.
Real celestials in the professional poker constellation make obscure cameos but the whole spectator poker fad seems so two-years-ago. I don't know that I would've been more interested in the games played onscreen were I still in the midst of my lightning-brief Celebrity Poker Showdown obsession (bulletin: David Schwimmer is a knob in real life, too), but sufficed to say that Lucky You at least has the good sense to know what it's not about and declines to descend into hoary underdog sports uplift devices. The picture, in fact, defies the desire to criticize it over-much at every turn. Sure, Duvall and Barrymore are abominable, but Bana lives in his beaten character's skin with a lithe, dangerous quality. When Billie observes, in a sterling moment too wise for someone about to toss her fate in with a person suffering from what some would say is an actual mental illness, that Huck's "eyes have gone dead"–by God, they have. It's a superb performance, one as casual as the film is rigid. He's the panther in Kafka's "The Hunger Artist"–and the rest of it is every bit as parabolic. It says a lot that the first ten minutes of the film, set in the kind of off-main street pawnshop that should be the setting for an entire movie by itself (ditto its bright-eyed proprietress Phyllis Somerville), is the best stretch of the picture, alive with the heat of real desperation and the charm that facilitates some deadly addictions. It's a vigour the rest of the picture squanders; I'm exhausted that Hanson, a director I genuinely like and admire, has made it his mission to produce films that are career-autobiographical in that way. Originally published: May 4, 2007.
THE DVD
by Bill Chambers Warner presents Lucky You on DVD in a 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer that looks a damn sight better than some of the studio's recent standard-def titles (and even, arguably, better than their Blu-ray release of Out for Justice). After some early traces of mosquito noise and combing, the kinks iron themselves out, leaving a consistently clean and detailed image behind. The accompanying DD 5.1 audio renders an atmospheric mix atmospherically; dialogued is firmly anchored in the centre channel. In what has become director Curtis Hanson's modus operandi, supplementing the feature are classy featurettes from production house Deuce Three. Both of them focus on the picture's verisimilitude, "The Players at the Table" (18 mins.) in terms of the real-life poker players recruited to appear in the film, sometimes as themselves, "The Reel Deal: The Time and Place of Lucky You" (14 mins.) in terms of recreating the 2003 World Series of Poker, the "big game" at the Bellagio, and winning/losing hands from actual games.
Some of the interviewees–such as John Hennigan, who portrays a thinly-veiled version of himself in the film–are surprisingly candid about the personal costs of being a professional gambler, though the cumulative effect of these testimonials is ironically to make Lucky You's protagonist seem like a bullshit Hollywood creation, Hanson's obvious affinity for the sub-culture to the contrary. Co-screenwriter Eric Roth apparently hated working with Hanson, but despite this and despite that he's a no-show among these extras, his "original screenplay" is mentioned often, always in reverential tones. (One suspects it wasn't as larded up with romantic bromides as the final draft.) Rounding out the platter, a nine-minute block of deleted scenes mostly consists of additional hands, although there's a rather painful sequence in which Debra Messing lip-synchs "Bartender Blues" underwater at the Mermaid while wearing a body stocking with sequined nipples. File it under "what were they thinking?"
123 minutes; PG-13; 2.40:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, French DD 5.1, Spanish DD 5.1; CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Warner
