‘Lucky’ a love letter to Stanton

‘American Made’ a new ‘but the same’ Tom Cruise

By Jocelyn Noveck

arry Dean Stanton Is Lucky,’ announces the trailer of the new film by John Carroll Lynch. That sentence means more than it sounds.

Yes, Stanton, the wonderful actor with that indelible hollow-cheeked, weather-beaten look who died this month at 91, plays a man called Lucky. Yes, the film is called “Lucky.” But what the phrase really means is that “Lucky Is Harry Dean Stanton,” in every possible way. The character was written for Stanton, and virtually every scene references his own life in some way. The director himself has called it a love letter to the actor.

In any case, we’re the lucky ones. While the movie as a purely cinematic experience is quirky at best and occasionally frustrating, Stanton shines throughout, and it’s a poignant and fitting sendoff for an actor who clearly still had much to give at age 89, when the film was made. In fact, maybe “Lucky” is really Stanton’s own love letter to his fans.

We begin, aptly, in the desert somewhere— surely a reference to “Paris, Texas,” the 1984 film that changed Stanton’s trajectory, finally making him a leading man. A tortoise crawls amid the cacti. Later in the film, we will hear that tortoises can live to be 100. And when we meet 90-year-old Lucky, it seems that he, too, will reach that milestone.

Lucky lives a low-maintenance life. He has few earthly ties — no spouse, no children “that I’m totally sure of,” no pets. He lives in a threadbare home with the few things he needs: a coffee maker, a fridge containing only milk, a closet with a few identical plaid shirts. And a cowboy hat, of course.

This is a man who clings to habit. Each morning he awakes to the same music, and does the same five yoga exercises in his white underwear. He makes the same coffee — lots of cream and sugar — and walks over to the same diner. “You’re nothing,” Lucky says to the owner, Joe. “You’re nothing,” Joe replies. This was apparently a favorite line of Stanton’s, an atheist who believed that we’re all, essentially, nothing.

Lucky’s day continues with his favorite TV game shows, a stop at the local grocery for milk, crossword puzzles, and later, after many cigarettes at the local bar, where he catches up with the same daily cast of characters. One of them, Howard, is played by director David Lynch in just one of a series of delicious cameos; Howard is deeply upset because his tortoise, President Roosevelt, has escaped. Much talk ensues about the nature of tortoises.

And the movie moseys along like this, vignette by vignette. What plot there is, centers around Lucky’s growing realization that he is, in fact, mortal. A scary fall leads him to his doctor — another nice cameo, by Ed Begley Jr. — who finds all in order, and doesn’t see much point in Lucky quitting smoking at his age.

We gradually learn some details of Lucky’s life story: He served in World War II, in the Navy (Stanton did, too.) He has a sad story about an animal. Most of all, he sings (Stanton did, too.) The scene where we witness this unexpected talent is hands down the most moving of the film.

Natural

And the most natural, too, so natural it feels like a documentary. This is a stark contrast with the scenes in the bar, where the dialogue suddenly sounds so mannered and showy, it feels like everyone is auditioning for a play. This unevenness can feel frustrating (the screenplay is by Logan Sparks, an old friend of Stanton’s, and Drago Sumonja).

Fortunately, Stanton’s presence is constant, and certainly overshadows any minor flaws. Even scenes where the actor is simply walking along the street, alone and silently, have a certain purposeful elegance to them. Apparently Stanton walked several miles in total during filming, in 100-degree heat. “He gave us everything he had,” the director has said. And us, too. Again, we’re the ones who are lucky. “Lucky,” a Magnolia Pictures release, is unrated by the Motion Picture Association of America. Running time: 88 minutes. Three stars out of four.

There are basically two kinds of Tom Cruise performances, and both can look pretty similar on the surface. Each likes sunglasses, going fast and smiling big.

He never exactly loosens up or slows down — the most unfathomable thing of all in Cruise’s world. But most of Cruise’s best and most interesting performances (“Magnolia”, “Jerry Maguire”, “Collateral,”, “Eyes Wide Shut”) have allowed some chink in the well-tanned armor, some hint of darkness underneath the rakish boyscout, some hollowness in the soul of America’s ageless action-movie avatar.

Cruise’s latest is the smart, zippy “American Made,” a movie that plays very much like your type-A Tom Cruise movie before it yanks the rug out from beneath you and reveals the B-movie Cruise we’ve been missing. It’s a fiendishly perfect vehicle for Cruise that returns him to the cockpit, 31 years after “Top Gun,” and it simultaneously reminds us of his preternaturally winning movie-star charisma while subtly deconstructing it.

Doug Liman, the film’s director, has shown a rare knack for intelligently packaging A-list personas in kinetic kaleidoscopes. He did it in “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, in “Bourne Identity” with Matt Damon and in his last film with Cruise, “Edge of Tomorrow,” the time-warped science fiction that proved a movie maxim: You just can’t kill Tom Cruise.

In “American Made”, a loosely true tale set in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Cruise plays Barry Seal, a TWA pilot whose on-the-side smuggling of Cuban cigars brings him into the orbit of the CIA. An officer named Shafer (Domhnall Gleeson) turns up, and offers him a job taking surveillance photos and making government payoffs to the likes of Panama’s Manuel Noriega in Central America. “We’re building nations down there,” says Shafer, giddy.

Seal, eyeing his own plane and eager to permanently switch off “auto-pilot,” jumps at the chance and doesn’t stop giggling at his good luck. “I do tend to leap before I look,” he says in a video diary that plays occasionally through the film. “Maybe I should have asked a few more questions.”

Blithely, even charmingly ignorant of the dangerous and ethically questionable terrain he’s entering, Seal is soon cheerfully smuggling enormous amounts of cocaine back to Arkansas for Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel. On both sides of the law, things escalate quickly. Seal and his family (Sarah Wright Olsen plays his wife), can’t spend their money fast enough. They run out of closet space and backyard holes for all the cash coming in.

The CIA’s missions grow more audacious, too. Seal becomes the government’s clandestine exporter of AK47s to the Nicaraguan Contras, who in turn are eventually flown back to Seal’s Arkansas base for military training. Seal greets them all with an easygoing grin: “Hola, amigos!” (AP)