Good Fortune, comedian Aziz Ansari’s feature directorial debut, is struggling at the box office. There are a lot of factors to blame: The generic title doesn’t in any way sell the fantasy film’s weirdness or whimsy. The script is preachy and often too on-the-nose about its themes. The performances are all weirdly flat and presentational, as if the actors were reading directly from scripts held just in front of their noses. And it comes at an anxious moment of extreme economic inequity that may make potential viewers even less tolerant than usual of a movie that essentially says, “Sure, rich people have all the advantages and all the fun — but poor people have heart!”
But here’s what Good Fortune has going for it: It’s unique, daring, creative, often funny, and certainly timely. And it’s a strangely great Keanu Reeves hangout movie.
I have never considered Reeves a good actor. I find his barely varying monotonal delivery and perpetual look of mild perturbation pretty one-note, in spite of the range of roles that Hollywood has tried to cram him into over the past 40 (!) years. Smart directors have cast him in roles where his rigidity works perfectly for a specific character, from My Own Private Idaho to The Matrix to John Wick. But almost all of those roles have called on him to look either hardened and closed-off, distant and removed, or both.
In Good Fortune, Reeves plays Gabriel, a minor guardian angel tasked with watching over people who text while driving. His entire job is to sit in his protectees’ cars and gently touch their shoulders when they’re about to crash, alerting them so they stop in time. But standing high above his city, looking down on the mortal world like an off-brand version of Bruno Ganz in Wim Wenders’ unassailable angel movie Wings of Desire, Gabriel gets ambitious. He wants to be a great guardian and a savior of lost souls.
So he presents himself to down-and-out odd-jobber Arj (Ansari), who’s living out of his car and cursing his life, and he swaps Arj into the life of stupidly rich tech mogul Jeff (Seth Rogen). The point of the exercise is that Arj is supposed to realize Jeff’s existence has its significant downsides, and gratefully return to his own life, kind of like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life gladly returns to his after being shown a vision of a world without him.
Problem is, Arj immediately realizes that Jeff’s problems (boring meetings, a pricey pool-heater bill) are negligible and easily solved with money, and that being rich opens up endless opportunities for self-indulgent fun. He has no interest in going back to his own life, and Gabriel can’t force him to return. Then, more bad news: For exceeding his mandate and messing with the order of the world, Gabriel is fired from his angel job, and turned into a mortal.
I was never convined by Reeves as an angel with big dreams and a burning desire to make a difference. He turns in the same vaguely constipated performance he’s been turning in for at least the last three decades. Watching him as an angel who’s just become mortal for the first time, on the other hand, was a blast, for a reason that really surprised me at first: It’s something new for the actor. Or more accurately, something old.
Early into his baffling career as a mortal, clinging to Jeff (who Gabriel swapped into Arj’s hand-to-mouth life and underemployed status), Gabriel starts tentatively trying out human experiences like chewing and swallowing food. And Reeves smiles. Authentically, hesitantly, joyously smiles. (It’s a lot more convincing than his smile on the poster, which looks Photoshopped in.)
It really took me aback to realize how surprising and welcome that smile felt. When was the last time we saw Keanu Reeves smile in a movie where he wasn’t expressing malice, sarcasm, or bitterness? He probably takes a shot at it somewhere in 2020’s misbegotten Bill & Ted Face the Music, but I’m not revisiting that mess to find out. Reeves has been stuck with grim, murderous, broody, or just solemn characters for so long that just watching him grin felt like seeing a completely different actor.
As the story goes on, Gabriel ends up having to get a dishwashing job, which doesn’t pay enough to live on, and he starts chain-smoking out of frustration. Just the image of Reeves in a disposable paper food-service hat, his late-career signature long hair pulled back in an unglamorous ponytail, slouching against a building and puffing on a cigarette, is worth the price of admission. The dishwasher getup completely changes his face and body: Suddenly, the slim, suited physical powerhouse of the John Wick movies is gawky, unglamorous, and a lot more human.
Good Fortune isn’t always fun to watch, especially when Ansari (who also wrote the script) has to find plausible reasons for Arj to give up a life of ease and comfort in order to go back to poverty and struggle. But it looks like it was a lot of fun to film — especially for Reeves, who seems to relax into the role as Gabriel’s life gets harder. In the late-film scenes where Gabriel bitterly complains about the difficulties of being human, or experiences small pleasures in camaraderie or tiny vices, you can see the years drop away as Reeves regains some of the loose, goofy, unguarded affect he had in his early 20s, shooting the Bill & Ted movies.
He never goes full Ted — Gabriel isn’t that young, energetic, or dumb. But for the first time in decades, it’s possible to see that role lurking under his skin. Good Fortune is expressly about the little joys in life, the joys people can experience even if they’re unemployed, unsupported by society, and struggling just to eat and stay dry. But the real joy of watching it is seeing Keanu Reeves’s well-cultivated hard-ass surface crack for a few moments, and glimpsing something through those cracks that moviegoers haven’t gotten to see in a long, long time.
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