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*/**** starring Seth Rogen, Aziz Ansari, Keke Palmer, Keanu Reeves written and directed by Aziz Ansari
by Walter Chaw Comedians can be great educators. They speak truth to power. They needle inconsistencies and hypocrisies to light like splinters coaxed from the body politic. Charlie Chaplin. George Carlin, of course. Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, Lucille Ball, Mary Tyler Moore–just the beginning of a roll call of storied court jesters attached to naked emperors. There are good modern examples, too, even ones who didn’t perform in Riyadh at the discretion of a homicidal regime fond of public beheadings, dismembering American journalists, and, you know, brutally punishing women who dare to challenge the status quo. And then there’s Riyadh headliner Aziz Ansari, who has made a career of playing the most irritating side character in other people’s stuff, parlaying whatever fame that earns a person into the smart, at times surprisingly raw three-season dramedy “Master of None”. There’s some depth to Ansari, it appears, despite his being the weakest part–whinging, facile, fast-talking, insincere–of his own strong project. Orson Welles famously said about Woody Allen:
He’s scared. He hates himself, and he loves himself, a very tense situation. It’s people like me who have to carry on and pretend to be modest. To me, it’s the most embarrassing thing in the world–a man who presents himself at his worst to get laughs, in order to free himself from his hang-ups. Everything he does on the screen is therapeutic.
I guess I feel the same way about Ansari. Given how I also see myself indicted by Welles’s scorn, there’s a distinct possibility my intense dislike of Ansari reveals a lot about my self-loathing. We tend to hate the things we resemble.
I approached Good Fortune hoping it would be like “Master of None”–and, at least superficially, it is. What it lacks is the trenchant racial observations of what was essentially an autobiographical exercise, replacing them with shallow commentary on the growing wealth gap, homelessness, and the gig culture in Los Angeles. This, despite its poor heroes being Desi and Black. It’s like a bad stand-up routine or an Emerald Fennell film about the proletariat. In preparation for Good Fortune, Ansari, a child of doctor parents, made a big deal about spending time with food-delivery drivers to understand their plight. (This after his previous film fell apart thanks to Bill Murray’s bad behaviour, which followed Ansari’s own brush with social shaming.) I think if you spend time boxing or driving a taxi before playing a boxer or taxi driver, there’s merit to that. I think if you need to spend time with people who can’t pay their bills and sleep in their cars to understand what it means to have to work multiple jobs and live paycheck-to-paycheck, the lessons you learn from such “research” might in fact be counterproductive to your ability to portray that experience authentically. It’s like going grocery shopping with Howard Schultz and teaching him how to use the self-checkout lane. Chloe Zhao, the child of a billionaire Chinese industrialist, fixated on the pooping-in-a-bucket aspect of van living while promoting her Oscar-winning Amazon apologia Nomadland, remember. Approach those who believe the lives of a significant percentage of Americans is a survivalist nightmare of extraordinary privation–and who need to lower themselves into the primate house for a few hours in order to understand them–with the same caution and scorn they accord us.
Ansari plays Arj, a gig-worker on a losing streak who one day delivers food to tech-bro billionaire Jeff (Seth Rogen) and then, through a series of divine interventions from well-intentioned low-ranking angel Gabriel (Keanu Reeves), awakens to find he has swapped lives with Jeff to learn a hard lesson about what’s really valuable. Turns out, money actually does make people’s lives a lot better, and Arj refuses to swap back. Ansari has said he was inspired by It’s a Wonderful Life and A Matter of Life and Death, but the films Good Fortune most resembles are Trading Places and Heaven Can Wait–if both were somehow directed by a combination of Stanley Kramer, an insulin plunger, and a participation ribbon. Beware the artist who vibe-drops a couple of the best films ever made to describe his Very Important bullshit. There are shades of Dogma and Wings of Desire here as well: the former for Ansari’s attempts at biting observational humour and the latter for a winsome sentimentality that communicates more easily through Bruno Ganz’s melancholy stare than it does through Ansari’s desperately ingratiating boggle-eyed expression. I think Good Fortune feels it has something to say. Ansari described it as a work addressing topics people aren’t talking about, yet the fact that people can’t afford to live in the United States seems to be all anyone around me is talking about. Maybe he’s just talking about what the people in his circle of friends aren’t talking about.
Keke Palmer is woefully wasted as a hardware employee trying to unionize her big-box store. Not even Palmer’s extraordinary charisma could convince me for a second that her Elena would be interested in Arj. I think Ansari sees himself as charming, maybe a bit of a ladykiller and pickup artist. His come-ons are extended bits: “How’s it over there in lumber? Good? I’m glad, because I was just in plumbing. It’s a shitshow.” If you’re thinking “Fozzie Bear asking for a reaction to a punchline,” that’s what I’m thinking, too. He won’t stop. The only one who emerges from this grab for relevance/bid for redemption unscathed is Reeves, who, now typecast as an angel, continues to play astonished and in the constant act of discovery well. As predictable as it is, Gabriel’s joy at trying a hamburger for the first time–and “chicken nuggies,” as Andy Reid would call them–is fun and feels, if not genuine, exactly, at least reassuringly artificial instead of irritatingly so. Reeves making his part work suggests that Good Fortune had potential, left untapped for want of any real stakes. Imagine if Jeff were murdered while delivering somebody’s ramen so he can afford to stay in a motor inn ’til the end of the month. Imagine if Arj got a cabinet position in a gold-plated White House where he encouraged all the desperate people who voted for his Fuhrer on a platform of inflation reduction to get on board with the constantly hallucinating AI that will take away their jobs, like immigrants were supposed to have. Or you could just watch Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice. Or nothing at all. Save your fucking money.
