One can read or listen to any number of books and podcasts addressing the inequities of the gig economy, income inequality and the burbling resentments of the working class. But movies are still the most populist, direct medium to communicate ideas like this, as is indicated by Aziz Ansari’s feature debut as writer and director.
“Good Fortune” (playing now in theaters) is nothing if not a clear-eyed parable about the winners and losers of late-stage capitalism; Ansari tackles them with a first-time filmmaker’s earnestness. The messaging can feel like a hammer at times, but in our current economy of nails, the bluntness feels right.
The characters constitute a holy trinity of sorts, brought together by labor and destiny, with ideas of eschatological dramas from “It’s a Wonderful Life” to “Wings of Desire” stitched into the fabric. Gabriel (Keanu Reeves) is a junior angel with undersized wings that are just for show—because even the angelic realm has its own corporate ladder. Envious of his colleagues, one of whom specializes in the lofty vocation of soul-saving, Gabriel is stuck in the drudgery of preventing texting-and-driving accidents in Greater Los Angeles—which Ansari cleverly, movingly presents in a montage of Gabriel, invisibly positioned in backseats of cars, providing a phantom touch to drivers’ shoulders, causing them to look up from their phones and avoid a crash.
One beneficiary of Gabriel’s duties is Arj (Ansari), a struggling film editor whose creative opportunities have dried up. He lives out of his car and works odd jobs, through a TaskRabbit-like app, that barely cover his expenses. Through a chance meeting with a wealthy venture capitalist, Jeff (Seth Rogen), who lives in a mansion with a boomerang-shaped pool and disco club, Arj ends up working as his assistant, until a poor decision leads to his abrupt termination.
Feeling as though all is lost, Arj unknowingly invites more angelic intervention from Gabriel, who sees an opportunity to mend a soul and maybe earn some bigger wings in the process. Gabriel’s method? Switch the lives of Arj and Jeff, so that Arj can realize wealth “isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” in Gabriel’s prophetic verbiage. Jeff might even learn a thing or two about the hardscrabble life of paycheck-to-paycheck survival.
There’s much more to the plot—too much, perhaps—ultimately contributing to a layer cake of irony upon irony, some of them sharp-eyed, others facile. Ansari is a child of the ‘80s, and “Good Fortune” feels like a throwback to that era of American comedy, where “switcheroo” fantasies were common; think “Trading Places,” “All of Me,” “18 Again,” “Big” and, going back a little further, the original “Freaky Friday.” “Good Fortune” belongs in this lineage, if it doesn’t quite have these features’ whimsy or comic zip.
Indeed, there are surprisingly few belly laughs for a vehicle for actors such as Rogen, Ansari and Margaret Cho, as Gabriel’s angelic supervisor. It’s more wry than hilarious, with withering bits about delivery-truck workers forced to urinate into water bottles, the casual cruelties of the star-rating system, and automation and AI taking our jobs. Ansari’s anger about these things is righteous and convincing, especially when he drops his shield of conceptual satire, and gifts an exhausted Keke Palmer—who plays Elena, a hardware store worker fighting for union organization at her business, and Arj’s love interest—with lines like this: “How can I fight a giant corporation when I’m fighting just to get by?” Ansari lets it hang there, knowing that even in this borderline-Pollyanna fable, some problems need more than an angel’s touch to solve.
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