by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $14.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Aziz Ansari, Keanu Reeves, Seth Rogen, Keke Palmer, Sandra Oh
Intro:
… a welcoming and cozy platter of celestial comedy, anchored by Keanu Reeves at his most adorable.
In Kevin Smith’s Dogma, the filmmaker’s trademark fixation on pop culture trivia took the form of angels (and other assorted ethereal bodies), who not only watched the living to pass the time… but also watched what the living themselves watched to pass their own time. The voice of God was a fan of The Karate Kid, Loki used Alice Through the Looking Glass to shake the faith of a nun, and Serendipity revealed the true origins of Home Alone.
Good Fortune, the cinematic writing/directing debut for star Aziz Ansari, feels like the result of a young, impressionable angel from that same host, who watched a few too many re-runs of A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life, and genuinely thought that people could change with such ease. In this film’s case, said angel is Gabriel (Keanu Reeves), who is basically a humanoid Labrador. He is happy to be doing anything and that effect is shared by the audience whenever he’s on-screen.
The bulk of the film’s entertainment comes from how genuine Reeves is in every single moment, whether he’s earnestly trying the celestial quick-fix on gig worker Arj (Ansari), discovering the joys of food truck tacos, or finding a brief reprieve from the worker’s grind during a smoko. He is in full Ted ‘hapless but optimistic wonder’ mode and it’s genuinely difficult imagining this role working even a tenth as well from any other performer. Even in the shadow of John Wick, this could stand as some of his finest acting work.
Of course, while Gabriel takes his rightful place at the centre of the film, the actual narrative does a lot of bouncing around between him, Arj, and Seth Rogen as the economically vulgar Jeff. Tying them together is a fairly scathing depiction of the American gig economy, with Arj as the lost soul struggling to get by, Jeff as the aloof product of late-stage capitalism, and Gabriel as the outsider who sees a very clear problem with this whole set-up, but not enough understanding to solve it.
Ansari’s script keeps even the quasi-body-swapping grounded, showing all the soul-crushing absurdities of this economy without either letting the doomerisms settle in or just assuming that raw sentimentality will set everything right. In turn, he creates an atmosphere of shared misery bonding, where individual strife has the potential to galvanise and potentially shift the firmament. Even more so than Gabriel, it’s Keke Palmer as love interest Elena that keeps spirits high, with a consistent energy of hope in the face of copious setbacks and a rather daunting understanding of the realities of life in the commercial shuffle.
And with the inclusion of Gabriel, its depiction of the heavenly body is reminiscent both of Dogma and of the many divine and hellish renderings in old Vertigo comics that inspired it in turn, where ‘as above, so below’ is defined as a mutual mundanity. Even the lads with wings get given shit jobs, and those free from gravity and mortality are just trying to get by, same as the rest of us; there’s something morbidly comforting in that idea.
Good Fortune is a welcoming and cozy platter of celestial comedy, anchored by Keanu Reeves at his most adorable. Some of the socioeconomic messaging feels too tidy, and there’s some jarring moments of telling-not-showing that can make even a story that is wandering feel rushed, but which is offset through Ansari’s jovial scripting, his superb rapport with his actors, and an approach to laying out the purgatory of gig work that is both down-to-earth and optimistic.
Beyond its salient subject matter, Good Fortune is sharpened monologuing (Rogen in particular gets an absolute belter, ripping into not just class divides but also certain… developments within the modern film industry), a refreshing admission that ODB was dead-on when he said “More money, more problems, my ass!”, and it’s just really fun to see Ansari, Rogen, and especially Reeves bond and hang out together on-screen.
