By Stacy Nguyen
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
“Good Fortune” is Aziz Ansari’s ambitious directorial debut for the big screen, a film he also wrote and stars in. It’s a story that mixes magical realism, comedy, and social commentary, following Arj (Ansari), a gig-economy worker in Los Angeles whose chaotic life catches the attention of Gabriel (Keanu Reeves), an angel who is very naive and thus bad at his job. Gabriel sees Arj as a lost soul that needs saving, so he decides that in order to teach Arj that money doesn’t solve life’s problems, Gabriel switches Arj’s life with that of Jeff (Seth Rogan), a mega wealthy tech-bro investor. After that, a lot of hijinks ensue as Arj gets used to being a baller, Jeff adapts (and is appalled) by having to actually work hard for a living, and Gabriel loses his wings. Other noteworthy actors rounding out this stacked cast include Keke Palmer playing Arj’s love interest and Sandra Oh as Gabriel’s boss.
So I really love the concept and idea of this movie and how it plays with and defies the audience’s expectations. I grew up with comedic movie adaptations of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”—movies like “Scrooged” (1988) with Bill Murray or even “The Family Man” (2000) with Nicolas Cage—these movies where the protagonist is a rich but lonely jerk at the beginning, undergoes some sort of life-swap phenomenon, before ultimately realizing that being rich ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. “Good Fortune” is in the vein of these stories, but has been updated to also be timely and appropriate for 2025, a world of incredible wealth disparity, where billionaires control everything and get everything, and where young Americans no longer can buy the kind of homes their parents were able to on a regular-person salary. “Good Fortune” humorously tries to remind us that, actually, money does solve all of our problems.
Unfortunately, while the idea of this movie is compelling, it fell flat for me in terms of the script (the story), Ansari’s acting, and also due to the context currently surrounding Ansari.
The story doesn’t fully go for it with gusto in any particular direction. It’s a story that can’t decide if it’s just a light comedy that isn’t all that deep—or if it’s comedic social commentary that is at least a little deep. The protagonist, Arj, may sleep in his car and fight for pennies in his Home-Depot-esque job and side gigs doing menial tasks for people on an app, but we never really feel like his life actually sucks that much. We’re never actually that worried for him, in part because the script treats his troubles so casually and flippantly—like no big deal—and also because Ansari’s acting is just not that compelling in this movie.
When he’s sad, I don’t believe it. When he’s desperate, I don’t feel it. Gabriel calls Arj a lost soul, but to me, he’s just a dude who is mildly depressed and who maybe needs a hobby. And when Arj meets Gabriel, a freaking impossible angel creature that appears out of thin air, Arj is not even that surprised that angels exist! He kind of just takes it in stride and is like, “Oh my God, who are you, I am so surprised right now! Oh you’re an angel? Got it, cool. What are you doing here, angel?” And some variation of this unnaturalness happens repeatedly in the movie with his acting. When he’s scared, he acts like this. When he’s happy, he acts like this. When he’s being romantic, he acts like this!
Okay, so about his co-star. I know we have to address it. Okay, so like many of us, I am a huge fangirl of Reeves and he really cannot do any wrong in my eyes. However, I am not ignorant of his foibles—even though I prefer to call them his idiosyncrasies. Like, I know he’s probably never going to win an Oscar purely for his acting. I know he’s amazing in action roles and in comedic roles, he has this specific type of character that he embodies really well—like the “Bill & Ted” guy. I know that outside of his wheelhouse, he struggles. I, too, have seen him act opposite Al Pacino in “The Devil’s Advocate” (1997).
So at first, I didn’t know what to make of Reeves’ performance in “Good Fortune,” because the character of Gabriel is so earnest, and I initially felt Reeve’s performance was too low-energy for this kind of character. However, by the end of the movie, watching the increasingly bizarre and amusing situations he stumbles into, Reeves as Gabriel won me over. Reeves’ natural style of line delivery (very deadpan, a little slow, and a little monotone) really emphasized how much of a fish-out-of-water Gabriel was. He’s an angel, guys! Which is basically an alien pretending to be human! Am I being biased? Am I constantly cheerleading for this man irrationally? Possibly! But guys, Reeves also never signed up to perform at a comedy festival paid for by Saudi blood money.
I, and so many other comedy fans, have been so aware and so disappointed that Ansari was one of the dudes that performed at the Riyadh Comedy Festival last month for a country with insane human rights violations. A lot of other comedians declined-boycotted this festival, like Atsuko Okatsuka.
But not Ansari. He went and did his thing. And I don’t know any other reason for accepting an invite to such a thing—beyond money, so he probably thought he was paid enough blood money to perform at this terrible festival meant to whitewash the human rights atrocities enacted by this government. Performing at this festival is so bad that, due to fan backlash, some of the comedians that performed tried to donate their fees to Human Rights Watch to get the public off their backs. But damningly, Human Rights Watch was like, “Nah, no thanks, bro,” and declined the donations from these comedians. Dude, that’s a statement.
So knowing this context, it’s hard for me to watch fictional Aziz Ansari in the movie that he wrote and directed being like, “I’m so poor, I’m so sad, I don’t have enough money, my job sucks, but here I am as a voice for the everyman in this film, tackling wealth inequity!” Like, nah, bro. No thanks.
I just don’t buy it. I don’t buy it when a multimillionaire decides they need more money, so they take it from the Saudis, and then a month later, show off their movie about how the wealth gap is real and sucks and how the normies should be able to form unions and date Keke Palmer even though they are so unremarkable and boring and undeserving of Keke Palmer’s character, Elena.
Leave a Reply