Mortal thoughts
LUCKY Alien, Repo Man and Paris, Texas actor Harry Dean Stanton says goodbye…
I’d wanted to direct for a long time,” says John Carroll Lynch, the sublime character actor whose 100-plus credits include Fargo, Zodiac and Shutter Island. “My friend Drago Sumonja [co-writer, with Logan Sparks] asked me to direct Lucky. Harry Dean Stanton was already attached since it was about him.”
Stanton’s farewell performance – he died, aged 91, just weeks before the film opened in the US – would be a moving affair if entirely fictional. That the title character, a rather cantankerous 90-year-old veteran who shuffles about his unremarkable business in a dusty Arizonian town, uses Stanton’s own biography and life philosophies… well, it makes Lucky damn-near unbearably poignant.
“Harry was on an LST [tank landing ship] in World War 2, he did have that experience with a mockingbird [an anecdote in the movie that simply slays], and the film is what he’d learned, what he felt the world was like,” continues Lynch, whose quiet, unfussy direction allows the performances to sing. “But he didn’t live in a no-horse town in Arizona. He lived on Mulholland Drive. He was quiet, but very social.”
Midway through Lucky, our hero’s fixed routine of drinking coffee, smoking a pack a day and frequenting the local bar is disturbed by a fall. He’s up and shuffling in no time, but it has him pondering mortality and “the truth of the universe”. Wasn’t that a bit much for Stanton to play so late in his own life?
“The mortality didn’t seem to faze him,” shrugs Lynch. “But giving away his own autobiography made him feel too vulnerable. When we were going to shoot the mockingjay story, he said, ‘Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to be doing that tomorrow.’ I had to talk him down. Harry didn’t think of himself as having a legacy but the movie did say something he wanted to say, otherwise he wouldn’t have taken on, at 89 years of age, a role that had 18 days of just him.”
Well, not just him, though he is in every scene. The bar is full of wonderful character actors (“Rolodex casting,” grins Lynch) including David Lynch (no relation) as Lucky’s best pal Howard, who’s lost his turtle. Howard is deliciously, well, Lynchian, but the part wasn’t written for the iconic filmmaker, who directed Stanton in Wild At Heart, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, The Straight Story, Inland Empire and Twin Peaks: The Return.
“We’d asked a couple of people and they were unable to,” Lynch says. “And Harry said, ‘What about David?’ It was like there was a campfire of friendship between them; you could feel the love between these two men.” Lucky is a film full of love, and loss. And is utterly unmissable.
ETA | 14 SEPTEMBER / LUCKY OPENS IN THE AUTUMN.