Lucky: A Spiritual Odyssey

Today’s Review will focus on John Caroll Lynch’s 2017 film: ‘Lucky’, starring legendary character actor Harry Dean Stanton.

To start off with, I think it’s important to establish who this film is for, because its themes are definitely presented with a select audience in mind.

In the title it was referred to as a: “spiritual odyssey”, because in essence, that is what this film is, a deep dive into a man’s being after he suffers a rude awakening in his small American hometown. 

This film is for those who are fascinated by those elements of human life that are clear to us all, but for large amounts of time go largely unnoticed. 

I’m talking about a film that prioritises subtlety over spectacle, one whose themes focus more on an adventure that is more to do with one’s inner reality than their outer one.

An adventure that sees a man coming to terms with his own mortality, whilst also accepting his role in a greater cosmic picture.

The film follows Harry Dean Stanton as the titular character: “Lucky”, a 90-year-old atheist who is known around his small town as a lone wolf, no wife, no kids, just an elderly man walking the streets alone in his small southern American town.

Even in his nineties he leads a life of healthy discipline, but after an incident that leaves him question his health, which later leads him to question his own mortality, he begins a slow journey deep into his being that leaves its impact on all around him in his small town. 

When watching this film, it is important that we remember that a story like this certainly won’t appeal to everyone, it may not even draw in a large audience. That certainly correlates with the very limited number of people that appear in the story, giving off that feeling of being in a small town, where a boisterous gathering at a bar might only include 6 people. 

That plays into the tone of the film also. A great filmmaker will make sure that there’s nothing pointless in his movie, nothing that would have no effect on the story if it were taken out. 

This is the case with the director John Carrol Lynch, who makes sure that each interaction that Lucky has whether it is with the people at the family-owned diner, the regulars at the local bar, or the convenience store owner, every conversation has a role to play no matter how deep or how simple the interaction may appear to be on the surface. 

Some things that stick out about the film include the respect it shows to its audience. Though Lucky wrestles with themes of spiritual truth, the acceptance of mortality, and the existential crisis that can come from accepting one’s limitations, the film does not try to confine you to a particular religion/denomination. Lucky doesn’t find Jesus, he doesn’t take on the ways of the Tao, or travel to India to seek guidance from a Guru, he discovers a unique universal truth within himself and all around him, and from then on, his battle soon becomes about reconciling that within himself. The film does not act as a piece of religious propaganda, rather it cuts through all religions and creeds to the heart of the matter, to the core of the human experience, which is a state of being that is beyond religious dogma, man-made societal structures, and any other barriers, personal and social, that get in our way of recognising and experiencing such truths.

It is this respect that is shown to the audience, that is what makes the films underlying message so powerful. The film industry now has become a place that is so hell-bent on hammering its audience over the head with its political views that it makes one have to think twice about watching any potential releases that are coming out for fear that they’re going to be brow-beaten for not subscribing to particular socio-political views that are in vogue at that moment. 

This is not to say that the film industry never did this, because they always did. They have always used film and T.V. to convey political and religious sentiment, but it seems nowadays filmmakers like to bludgeon their audience over the head with their views, rather than deliver their messaging in a more subtle way, as was the case in previous decades.

Thankfully, this issue of bludgeoning viewers over the head with religious doctrine doesn’t exist in Lucky.

It respects the fact that truth is a lot more broader than any organised religion, and that any attempt at trying to understand that through the use of words is ultimately futile. All one can really do is sit back and marvel at the mystery that is life itself.

The film does not shy away from its setting. It embraces the small-town monotony that one may experience if they were living there. Showing us the seemingly mild interactions that you would not think would belong in a film because they would not be engaging enough to hold a viewer’s attention, especially for 80 minutes. But they do.

Once again it adds to the films themes by showing us the opposites of one spectrum. Lucky’s character leads a pretty standard life for a 90-year-old man, and his outward appearance and actions correlate with that. 

But underneath it you can sense that there’s something at the heart of these exchanges that Lucky has with the world around him that act as an indication of what is going on inside of him once he goes through that aforementioned rude awakening that was mentioned earlier.

Lucky is not a film for those who prioritise spectacle over subtlety. The story doesn’t climax in a particularly cinematic way, the reverse happens, it eases its way into a conclusion that has you calmly accepting the films natural end rather than getting you all exhilarated by the final act. Some people will like this, and some people won’t, and that’s fine. 

I want to take some time to mention the cast, in particular the leading man himself: Harry Dean Stanton. Stanton has been immortalised as somewhat of a cult figure in the world of cinema. He has worked with some of the most acclaimed directors in the industry. People like: David Lynch, Francis Ford Coppola, Riddley Scott, etc. His film and tv credits stretch out over a span of multiple decades. Stanton has in ways been typecast as a lone wanderer type of character. Someone who does not subscribe to convention. And nowhere is this more evident than in what would be his last film Lucky, the beloved character actor dying just six months after the release of the film.

Art tends to mimic life, and the same can be said the other way around. Life mimics art. Stanton’s death made this last film appearance of his a very meta retirement, it’s akin to Roy Batty from the original Blade runner movie, released in 1982, dying in a film that’s set in the year 2019, only for the actor who played him, Rutger Hauer, to die in real life in the year 2019 itself.

Stanton played the titular character with a sincerity that sadly has not been seen in the film industry for a while. Today’s films have fallen into the habit of relying too much on irony as a way of placating a more cynical audience. In the 2000s ironic parodies were celebrated for dismantling and poking fun at long established story tropes that have been the norm for centuries. Then in the 2010s they pretty much became the norm. Irony in film was the new standard. 

But with that, something has been weakened, and that is the presence of sincerity in storytelling. Whether it’s film, TV, books, or any other medium of storytelling irony and cynicism has left modern day films bereft of any emotional impact on the viewer because nothing is treated seriously anymore, everything is a joke. And when everything’s treated as a joke, nothing is treated with respect.

Thankfully Lucky, and specifically Stanton’s portrayal of the character, doesn’t fall into that trap. Stanton doesn’t ironically wink at the audience with witty jokes about being an old man at deaths door, and he doesn’t treat his small, seemingly mundane interactions with other people as pointless; he performs with a weight and a gravitas that commands the viewers respect for the story.

The death of Stanton seemed to be something that further punctuated Lucky as not just a film about a man who simultaneously came to grips with his own mortality whilst accepting the unknowable nature of life itself, but an unintentional send off to one of the most decorated actors in the history of cinema, no where do you get this sense of finality in Stanton’s career, and on a deeper level his own life, than when he walks off into the distance, vanishing from sight.