Lucky

If ever there was a deserving send off for a grand actor, then this be it.

As "Lucky", the cantankerous but lovable old sole, shuffling his way out of this mortal coil, Harry Dean Stanton is, as always, remarkable.

Striding with purpose, very slowly, through a very regimented daily routine - diner coffee, crossword, game shows, cactus watering, smokes, drinks at the local watering hole - Lucky is revealed as a complex, always thinking, opinionated, ready to drop the gloves, 91 year old.

There are several great performances, highlighted by David Lynch bemoaning the escape of his pet tortoise, but the film really belongs to Harry. Swiping some great real life histories (Stanton's stint with the Navy) blurs the line between fact and fiction just enough to act both as a fitting tribute and engrossing movie on it's own merit. This is a talkie, where action moves at a tortoise pace, but it matters not, for Lucky has that rare power to draw the audience right on in.

Among the many low key but brilliant highlights, is a stirring scene to which Johnny Cash sings Bonnie Prince Billie's "I See a Darkness".

Harry Dean Stanton was indeed Lucky.

A loving homage to an actor and musician that anyone over 50 has seen in movies over several decades. I wiped away tears several times over beautiful, thoughtful musings by Lucky, who, in most respects, was Harry Dean Stanton himself. This is a small but significant slice of life movie and showcases excellent writing, direction and acting by several collaborators who've worked together before. Notable understated performance by David Lynch whose character's lost tortoise serves as an analogy that some viewers who haven't lived several decades yet will not yet appreciate. I was stilled when Lucky sang, sad when Johnny Cash sang and I smiled, satisfied, at the end. I will watch this movie again with friends who understand the beauty of a simple and well written film like this and we will all feel satisfied and more connected as a result.

2017 saw the passing of both Harry Dean Stanton and Sam Shepard, two-thirds of the creative triumvirate behind the classic 1984 road movie / western PARIS, TEXAS. Wim Wenders and Shephard contrived to give Stanton - a career character actor - one of the greatest roles in twentieth century cinema and he owned every guilt-ridden moment of that film. John Carroll Lynch, in many ways a modern day Stanton, uses his directorial debut to showcase the ninety-year-old Stanton's formidable cussedness and aching vulnerability in a way that is as perfect a bookend to an acting career as GRAN TORINO was to Clint Eastwood.

LUCKY is a deceptively simple tale of a determinedly alone old naval officer, who has got to the stage in life where even his doctor (a fabulous cameo from Ed Begley Jr.) has nothing to tell him when he takes a dizzy tumble. This is an old man, going about things the only way he knows how. His days are a series of little routines sparingly conveyed through repetition and variation in the first half of the film. He knows he is going to die, he knows this scares him, but he also knows there is little else he can do other than persist, like the best of Samuel Beckett's characters.

There is something a little reminiscent of another Wenders' film in LUCKY, namely LIGHTNING OVER WATER. In that part-documentary, Wenders' sought to approach his own fear of death through the imminent mortality of veteran Hollywood filmmaker and close friend Nicholas Ray. Carroll Lynch is similarly engaging with the genuine fears of vulnerabilities of the ageing Stanton, as a means of tapping in to a wider understanding of what death is and what it means.

The film vacillates between profound human empathy and a less appealing, although far less prominent, sentimentality. It is often at its strongest in the barroom scenes in which Lucky goes through the motions of his compromised masculinity and desperately rails against and longs for the reckoning that remains a few miles further down the road. Carroll Lynch keeps the overall tone light and as sunny as the Californian landscape that his film cleaves to, which only makes moments like when Stanton lets rip with a Mariachi band all the more poignant, urgent and arresting. With some great supporting turns from the likes of David Lynch, Tom Skerritt and Ron Livingston, this perfectly formed, smallscale movie, has much bigger concerns at its heart.

Lucky is both eerie and alluring in that it hasn't just turned out to be Harry Dean Stanton's swan song, it's as if all of those involved in the making of it were watching the Grim Reaper approach Mr. Stanton from a distance during filming.They were certainly aware - and impressed - that he was 90 years old. There's not a bad performance in the whole film; everyone gives a thoughtful, elegant performance as if there is no room for childishness in the presence of the approaching death of their friend. Surely Mr. Stanton could feel to the core that his days were numbered, and wow did that make for an eloquent performance in a role perfectly suited for him. Despite Lucky being a film about the waning of life, it's not a morose film; the message seems to be that while death is scary, you can still smile at it, and still smile till the end. And while you lose some liveliness as you grow old, that doesn't mean that you have to lose your feistiness. As much as I enjoyed Lucky, I also believe that a good filmmaker could have followed almost any old man for a few weeks with a video camera and come up with an equally interesting film. Lucky is essentially one down-to-earth old man's tale of a rather unexciting present-day life, and that's about it...but maybe that's special in itself. Still, I didn't see a whole lot that was fantastic about it beyond Mr. Stanton's performance. But there's no denying that it's a well-made film, with poignant and sometimes amusing moments, moving stories from the distant past, and many good shots of the desolate, solitary desert.

Please disregard that review by an IMDb user who claims to "Crave intellectual depth" but is clearly unable to recognize it, and cannot see beyond the superficial.

It proves what Lucky says in the film: "I always thought that the one thing we could agree on is what we were looking at...but that's bullshit, because what I see isn't what you see."

Mr. Stanton's powerful, truth-telling performance is at turns heartbreaking, uplifting, hilarious, and inspiring.

Please do yourself a favor and see this very special film.