Stanton gives beautiful final show in ‘Lucky’
Harry Dean Stanton died last month at 91. In his new movie, “Lucky,” he plays a 90-year- old contemplating his own mortality. If “Lucky” is inevitably sadder to watch now than it was six months ago, when it premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival, it is also bracingly devoid of cynicism or cruelty.
Directed by John Carroll Lynch — himself an exceptional character actor in pictures such as “Zodiac” and “The Founder” — the movie is an insistently lowkey and dryly funny valentine to Stanton’s life and career.
Lucky is a U.S. Navy veteran, a longtime resident of his remote desert town, a hardened atheist and, above all, a creature of habit. After starting each morning with an intensive yoga reg- imen, he puts on a plaid shirt, boots anda cowboy hat andheads to a nearby diner for a cup of coffee and a crossword puzzle.
In the afternoon there are errands to run, cigarettes to buy, old TV game shows to watch and a few mildly surprising detours, followed by a Bloody Mary at a bar whose staff and clientele Lucky knows well enough to bicker with long into the night.
There’s a moment early onwhen Lucky suddenly collapses at home, and viewers may dread the beginnings of a plot being set in motion — one that, in keeping with the sentimental tendencies of other movies, might end with our hero in a hospital room. Happily, “Lucky” sidesteps such clichés.
The reason for his fall is never explained, and his doctor ( Ed Begley Jr.) proclaims him to be in
reasonably good health. “You’re one tough son of a bitch,” he says, conceding that even giving up smoking would probably do Lucky more harm than good at this point.
The end will come for him eventually, of course, although whether it does in thismovie’s fleet 88minutes I will leave for viewers to discover. At times you can sense the writers clearing their throats to usher in the looming specter of death, as when Lucky listens to an insurance salesman (a terrific Ron Liv- ingston) talk about a lifethreatening experience, or a Marine veteran ( Tom Skerritt) sharing a haunting wartime memory.
Lucky, who doesn’t believe in life after death, isn’t about to change his stance, and “Lucky” isn’t interested in either affirming or denying his point of view. Instead, the movie nurtures a quiet sense of mystery.
Lucky’s grouchy demeanor doesn’t begin to explain the deep affection the rest of the town feels for him. And as brusque and intractable as he may be, he remains remarkably receptive to everyday compassion. When a waitress ( Yvonne Huff) stops by his house to check up on him after his fall, they wind up smoking a joint and watching Liberace on TV — an interlude that ends with Lucky’s difficult admission that he’s scared of what’s to come.
The better one knows Stanton’s life and movies, the more the long silences and gently meandering rhythms of “Lucky” resonate. There’s a moment in the diner when Lucky acknowledges that, among other things, he’s never married or fathered any children (that he’s aware of), and Stanton delivers those terse responses with such delicacy of feeling that the line separating the character from the ac- tor seems to evaporate.
At times the film’s eccentric small- town vibe can’t help but bring to mind a dustier, less malevolent version of “Twin Peaks,” the show whose recent resurgence handed Stanton one of his other final screen roles. And David Lynch himself (no relation to the movie’s director) turns up in the most robust and memorable of themovie’s supporting performances, playing an earnest local who is agitated over the loss of his pet tortoise. Self- parody alone couldn’t begin to account for the emotional force he brings to a simple line: “He affected me.”
Often framing Stanton against a rugged desert landscape, walking purposefully toward his next destination, John Carroll Lynch pays continual homage to the actor’s majestic performance inWim Wenders’ “Paris, Texas.” That 1984 masterpiece features one of Stanton’s few leading roles, and it too revealed an indelible authenticity in every crevice of its actor’s weathered visage.
When a character in “Lucky” makes reference to the soul, Stanton’s Lucky savagely retorts that there’s no such thing, unaware — or perhaps fully aware — that his own presence could serve as such a magnificent contradiction.