Crew
Director/Screenplay – Aziz Ansari, Producers – Aziz Ansari, Anthony Katagas & Alan Yang, Photography – Adam Newport-Berra, Music – Carter Burwell, Visual Effects – Crafty Apes (Supervisor – Jasper Kidd), Special Effects Supervisor – Jonathan Kombrinck, Production Design – Kay Lee. Production Company – Garam Films/Keep Your Head/Yang Pictures.
Cast
Aziz Ansari (Arj), Keanu Reeves (Gabriel), Seth Rogen (Jeff), Keke Palmer (Elena), Sandra Oh (Martha), Stephen McKinley Henderson (Azrael), Erik Estrada (Security Guard)
Plot
The angel Gabriel has been assigned to the job of making sure people don’t crash when texting and driving. He has sympathy for Arj, a gig worker struggling to make ends meet and wondering why he keeps on going. Gabriel asks his superior Martha to be more active in changing people’s lives. After his request is declined, Gabriel appears to a downcast Arj and touches him on his shoulder. This causes Arj to now inhabit the life of Jeff, a successful tech bro who has just fired Arj, while Jeff now becomes the unemployed gig worker. Arj enjoys the life of privilege that having so much money brings him. Gabriel tries to convince Arj to go back to his old life but he has no interesting in doing so, leaving Gabriel realising he has made a mistake. Gabriel then accidentally touches Jeff, causing him to be fully aware of what has happened. For this, Gabriel is demoted to being a human by his superiors. Together, he and Jeff struggle to make ends meet working the gig economy.
Aziz Ansari is not a name familiar to me before. Ansari is a popular comedian who emerged with the success of tv’s Parks and Recreation (2009-15). Ansari has made assorted film and tv appearances since and is popular as a stand-up comedian. I am not a watcher of comedy – I had typed his name up a couple of time for voice acting roles in animation – but otherwise had no idea who Ansari was until his name popped up during #MeToo in an incident in 2018 when a woman claimed she felt pressured to have sex with him. Ansari claimed the incident was consensual and the story was one that attracted criticism for being a dubious borderline claim that jumped aboard the bandwagon to take down celebrities. Such did not appear to affect Ansari much and with Good Fortune, he now makes his feature film directing/writing/starring debut.
The novelty that Good Fortune comes with is the pitch of being “the one where Keanu Reeves plays an angel.” Here Ansari seems to draw from Wings of Desire (1987), or perhaps even more so its Americanised remake City of Angels (1998), which had a bunch of angels invisibly looking in on Los Angeles. Although here the angels are a little more proactive and actually intervene to prevent accidents and help people.
The main problem with the Keanu Reeves as an angel concept is that Keanu is such a flat actor. The man is a legitimate superstar, has made some classic works and from all accounts a super nice guy in real life. And yet for all that he is very limited actor. Here when required to deliver comic lines, his delivery falls flat and he has rings run around him by more experienced comedy players like Ansari and Seth Rogen. He projects a certain hangdog sympathy but in other scenes like where he is telling Ansari he is a ‘dumdum’, his delivery falls utterly flat, as though he were reading lines by rote.
And for all that he directs, writes, produces and stars in the film, Ansari comes across as a rather too milquetoast a presence on screen. You wanted him to light it up like an Eddie Murphy or a Martin Lawrence but the lines he writes himself often fall flat and he emerges as a singularly ordinary Ordinary Joe.
The plot of Good Fortune has been slung together as a rehash of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) where an angel intervenes to show a poor schmuck what life would be like without him or if it were different. There have been a number of variants on this. It feels that this has been thrown together with the plot of Trading Places (1983) where rich Dan Aykroyd and poor Eddie Murphy are thrown together in a scheme where there are made to switch positions in life.
Perhaps Good Fortune’s historical significance will be less in terms of its performances than it offers an uncanny insight into the economic hardships of the 2020s gig economy. Ansari’s character is leading a bottom-feeding existence taking part-time jobs on warehouses, kid minding, standing in lines for free donuts and organising people’s garages, while being forced to live in his car. Even when he does get a job as a delivery driver, he has the humiliation of being given plastic pee bottles because he is not allowed to stop. At the other end is Seth Rogen’s tech bro who lives a life of luxury for having set up a job he later refers to as having exploited the people at the bottom. The film does contain the wish fulfilment of Keke Palmer organising a union and the improbable scene where the workers walk off the job and toss their pee bottles in a pile. Not to mention of Rogen using his controlling shares to force the company to pay their workers better – as though that would ever happen in real life.
Trailer here