It’s simple to overlook the arrogance of Billy Wilder or Frank Capra at any time when some courageous soul tries to make a comedy that takes America’s temperature by straddling cynicism and optimism. These Hollywood masters might handily juggle the candy, bitter and satirical and, in Wilder’s case, even go away you believing in a cheerful ending.
Along with his writing-directing characteristic debut, “Good Fortune,” nonetheless, Aziz Ansari, who stars alongside Seth Rogen and Keanu Reeves (as an angel named Gabriel), swings large, hoping to seize that jokey truth-telling vibe concerning the State of Issues. His topic is a fertile one too: the gig financial system fostering our crushing inequity, but additionally the desperation of the have-nots and the way oblivious the rich are about those that made them wealthy. So let’s stick it to the billionaires! Let Keanu assist the downtrodden!
Ansari’s high-low morality story, set in our honest (and unfair) Los Angeles, is a pleasant melding of celestially tinged tales (“Heaven Can Wait,” “Wings of Want”) and body-swap comedies (“Buying and selling Locations”). However as agreeable as it’s, it might’t sq. its jabs with its sentimentality. It’s received coronary heart, sort eyes, a wry smile and a few humorous traces, however no tooth when you really want issues bitten into, chewed up and spit out.
Ansari performs Arj, dwelling a severe disconnection between his skilled identification — wannabe Hollywood movie editor — and the way he really exists: task-gigging for scraps and dwelling in his automotive. When a garage-reorganizing job for Jeff (Rogen), a Bel-Air enterprise capitalist, turns into an assistant place, Arj feels safe sufficient to make use of the corporate card for a elaborate dinner with occasional colleague and romantic curiosity Elena (an underused Keke Palmer). Jeff clocks the cost the following day, although (a practical element concerning the wealthy watching each penny), and instantly fires Arj.
All alongside, Arj’s unhappy scenario has touched Reeves’ long-haired, khaki-suited angel, whose life-saving purview (he makes a speciality of jostling distracted drivers) is low within the hierarchy overseen by boss guardian Martha (Sandra Oh). Gabriel needs an enormous therapeutic job to indicate Arj, with slightly role-reversal magic, that being Jeff isn’t all it’s cracked as much as be. Besides, after all, it’s. (David Mamet’s line “All people wants cash — that’s why they name it cash” involves thoughts.) The newly luxe-and-loving-it Arj exhibits no indicators of wanting to change again (which is outwardly his name to make within the guidelines of this state of affairs), leaving out-of-his-depth Gabriel within the place of convincing a sudden billionaire why he ought to return to being poor.
Which is the place “Good Fortune,” for all its grasp of how Melancholy-era screwball comedies made the filthy wealthy mockable, struggles to match its issue-driven humor with its fix-it coronary heart. Whereas it’s humorous to observe Rogen’s freshly determined character undergo food-delivery humiliation, shopping for the script’s modifications of coronary heart — and the movie’s naïve concept of the place everybody needs to be on the finish — is one other matter. That’s why screwball comedies didn’t attempt to upend capitalism, simply have some intelligent enjoyable with it and let a easy love story stick the touchdown. Ansari’s ambition is admirable however he’s higher at diagnoses than options.
His gold-touch transfer is giving the hilariously deadpan Reeves one in all his greatest roles in years: a goofy meme dropped at disarming life and the film’s beating coronary heart. Doing good might be laborious work; understanding people is more durable. Plus, Reeves makes consuming a burger for the primary time a sublimely humorous reaffirmation that typically, certainly, it’s a fantastic life.
‘Good Fortune’
Rated: R, for language and a few drug use
Operating time: 1 hour, 38 minutes
Taking part in: In broad launch Friday, Oct. 17
