When I exited the theater after seeing Aziz Ansari’s new comedy Good Fortune starring Keanu Reeves, Aziz Ansari, Seth Rogen, and Keke Palmer, I was on a high because it’s been a while since I saw a solid comedy in the theater. Surprisingly, that movie also had Keke Palmer in it. The audience I saw the film with very much enjoyed it, as we heard loud laughs all throughout the film. It felt like it touched a nerve and tapped into people’s current feelings of how life is going right now. That’s something all the Oscar-bait dramas and big-budget tentpoles haven’t completely done as well as I think this film has this year. The film touches on class, the human experience, and a favorite of Ansari – romance in a lovely mix that works together and keeps Ansari’s voice.
The story starts with Gabriel, an angel played by Reeves, who is a lower-level angel who makes sure people who are texting and driving don’t crash. Gabriel wants to do more to help people, and one day he focuses on a man named Arj (Ansari), who is a struggling gig worker in a very, very down period of his life. After working for Rogen’s Jeff, a wealthy man who needs an assistant to do the most basic of tasks, fires Arj for kind of dubious reasons, Gabriel gives Arj the chance to see what it’s like to live Jeff’s life to appreciate his own more. So Gabriel’s plan fails because this is the current United States, and Jeff’s life is amazing if you’re broke.
If you’ve ever seen Ansari’s stand-up, you can have an idea of how Arj acts once he’s a rich person, and it’s hilarious to see how Keanu’s Gabriel is baffled by this. This character feels like Ted Logan from Bill and Ted in how he’s such a himbo, and this is when his character becomes more important to the plot. Keanu is so much fun in this as he plays an angel learning what it is to be human, and while we’ve seen this movie before, he’s still being a supporting character, and the c-plot with Sandra Oh playing his Angel boss Martha is still about helping and advising Arj and then Jeff.
Speaking of Jeff, Rogen does play a character familiar to what we’ve seen from him before and even recently in The Studio, but his arc is what makes him in the film really work and add to the whole. His character goes from Prince to Pauper and learns a lot about the world, his life, and what we wish not only rich people would understand, but how tech bros could see the world if they only had to live in the disruption they’ve caused. It’s the most unrealistic thing in the film, but it helps bring the whole story and message together.
Keke Palmer rounds out the main cast as Elena, Arj’s love interest in this story, and is also vital to Gabriel’s arc. Palmer is solid here as an all-around great, beautiful woman. She ends up being the straight person in her scenes. Her character is one that makes Arj question his actual wants and how he interacts in the world. She feels more like the moral center in the film than the Angel characters. She gets to be more serious rom-com mode Keke Palmer than the drawing the attention star she has to be in her own vehicles or even something like The Pickup. I’d love to see her work with all these actors again. Her scenes with Ansari are sweet and bring back that feeling of his Master of None.
So I feel seeing a comedy mix supernatural elements along with well-worn comedy movie tropes so deftly with commentary on the nature of class, community, and relationships, it put it as one of my favorites of the year. I think this film handles the ideas of class and relationships better than the Materialists from earlier in the year, as it ends up being more complex going on in the story than the celebrated drama from earlier in the year. The likability of all the actors helps, but it’s easy to just fall into the film world after a few minutes. Seeing people react so strongly and positively was also a pleasure to see. Seeing Good Fortune struggle in theaters does bum me out because I think this is a movie a lot of people need to see.
Rating: A
Level of Enthusiasm: 70%
