Delight is hard to come by at the movies these days, and most of us will take any little scrap we can get. Good Fortune, Aziz Ansari’s directorial debut—he also wrote the film and stars in it—may be a movie made up of scraps, but plenty of them throw off sparks of joy. Like One of Them Days, a surprise hit earlier this year, Good Fortune has the cojones to confront one of the major issues of the day: that too many people are working too hard for too little money, while the billionaires at the top sit back and watch the dollars roll in, with no regard for anyone but themselves. The movie’s tone counts for a lot: it’s silly and funny, and you never feel you’re trapped in a civics lecture. Good Fortune is amiable, but it also has some bite.
Ansari stars as Arj, an underemployed Los Angeles documentary-film editor who’s been reduced to living in his car, barely staying afloat by juggling a series of dismal Taskrabbit-y jobs. One minute he’s assembling furniture, the next he’s standing in line at a fancy bakery to pick up an order for some rich guy—or at least someone who’s better off than he is. One of his gigs is part-time work at a big box lumber and hardware store. It’s there that he meets Elena (played by the effervescent Keke Palmer, also one of the stars of One of Them Days), a furniture maker and smart cookie who’s trying to unionize the store’s workforce.
Arj is just one of Earth’s poor creatures trying to get by. What he doesn’t know is that there’s a cadre of guardian angels watching over us all, one of whom is Keanu Reeves’ Gabriel: he gazes down upon the sorry human population from on high, much like the celestial beings in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. Gabriel, sporting a balmacaan raincoat and mini wings (he’s a junior angel who hasn’t yet earned the full-sized ones of his elder peers), has been assigned with preventing accidents caused…
