“The Prince and the Pauper” was written all the way back in 1881, from the satirical genius of Mark Twain. While I doubt that Twain completely invented the story and themes out of whole cloth, it’s become the commonly accepted shorthand for the concept. It’s a story about a rich boy and a poor boy who are somehow identical enough to switch places, so the wealthy and powerful one can get a sense of what it’s like to be dirt poor and vice versa. And in the end, they both learn the grass is always greener on the other side and being rich isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
So here we are with Good Fortune, to show how that moral is a huge crock of shit in this time of late-stage capitalism. Yet even as the film subverts the premise, it also serves to update and correct the premise in a nicely empowering way. And it all comes to us from… Aziz Ansari. Here making his writing/directing feature debut while also playing a lead role. Okay, let’s see what happens.
Ansari plays Arj, an Indian immigrant who couldn’t find a career as a documentary filmmaker. Thus he’s working around the clock through multiple odd jobs to pay off his student debt while he’s living in his car. Arj does get a temporary windfall when he talks his way into working as an assistant for Jeff, a wealthy venture capitalist played by Seth Rogen. Unfortunately, one thing leads to another, Arj loses his assistant job, and he’s left with so little that he’s worth more dead than alive.
Enter Gabriel (Keanu Reeves), a junior guardian angel in charge of saving people from texting and driving. Unsatisfied with such a menial and impersonal job, Gabriel wants a promotion and bigger wings, and he sees his chance with Arj. Thus Gabriel gets the bright idea of switching Arj and Jeff so that each has the other one’s life.
Gabriel figured that walking a mile in someone else’s shoes would give Arj a deeper appreciation for what he has. In practice, Arj is so much happier as a billionaire, living such an easier life that he has no intention of going back. Things only get worse from there, most especially for Gabriel and Jeff.
To get this out of the way, Jeff is played by Seth Rogen, so you know exactly what you’re getting. Moreover, Jeff’s whole deal is that he’s humbled into realizing that he isn’t as smart or as tough as he thinks he is because he can’t cut it in a world specifically built to prey upon the poor. No surprises here.
But then we have Gabriel. No two ways about it, this guy is an idiot. He breaks literally everything he touches. For all his good intentions, every last one of his actions and ideas only serves to make everything worse.
That said, what’s interesting about Gabriel is that all of his mistakes stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature. After all, this whole messy plot got started because Gabriel didn’t appreciate how traumatic and costly and potentially fatal a car accident can be, and what a huge service he’s doing by saving people from all of that. In fact, it’s a rather huge plot point that Arj lost his assistant job and the intended timeline got considerably darker precisely because Gabriel didn’t stop a car crash like he was supposed to!
Don’t ask me to explain all that, it’s a butterfly effect sort of thing in which the car crash spun out into a cascade of unintended consequences and unnecessary hardship. That’s the point.
The upshot is that Gabriel’s meddling costs him his wings and now he has to learn how to live as a human for the first time. In the process, he learns all about the joys and hardships of living as a human in the modern world. It dovetails beautifully well with the overarching theme of learning how to find hope and keep on living in a world where a select few have everything and so many are barely scraping by.
As for Arj, his whole deal is that he’s got the whole world literally handed to him on a plate. His “work” consists almost entirely of meeting other rich assholes and tangentially discussing business opportunities over lavish meals. Arj never wants to go back to the days of living in his car, wondering where his next meal is coming from, worrying that he’s going to lose his job to a robot.
There’s only one drawback, but it’s a big one: None of it really belongs to Arj. Even his friends are vapid assholes with bank accounts instead of personalities. Sure, Arj does try to lift up friends and family from his past life, but that only means so much when none of them recognize him. And he can’t encourage them to keep fighting and hoping for a better future because Arj — who came into everything through literal divine intervention — is in no place to serve as a good example or show others how it’s done.
Everything Arj has is empty and flavorless because he didn’t do anything to earn it. But — and this is the really important part — neither did Jeff.
Near the start of the film, Arj outright states that the American Dream is dead (a statement that carries a lot more heft, coming from an immigrant), but the truth is more complicated. The American Dream is the promise that if we work hard and play by the rules, anyone can be successful. But how hard is working hard enough, and for how long? Who makes the rules, and how often do they change? What does it mean to be “successful”? And who or what decides who gets to be successful when “anyone” can be successful, but everyone can’t?
The American Dream isn’t dead or even false — we all just got screwed over by the fine print.
The film posits that our nation is broken because hard work is no longer directly tied to success or wealth. Through inheritance from wealthy parents, a predatory system of capitalism specifically designed to drain and oppress the middle and lower class, and a society that generally rewards and praises wealth while stigmatizing and punishing poverty, the poor are made to stay poor no matter how hard they work while the wealthy get to stay wealthy no matter how little they work. That isn’t fair, it isn’t right, and it’s not sustainable in the long run.
And to be clear, neither I nor the film are arguing that the poor should all live like kings. But is it really so much to ask that everyone be given a fair chance at earning enough to live? It’s like our capitalist-driven culture is so far psychotic that we’ve lost all concept of the word “enough.” As if living was a luxury and we should all be grateful merely to survive. I digress.
All of that aside, there’s still the central question: How does anyone stuck in the gutters find a reason to keep on living? For that, we turn to the love interest. Elena (Keke Palmer) works at a local hardware store, where she’s fighting an uphill battle trying to unionize her workplace. It’s a tough and ongoing battle for incremental changes, but at least it’s a viable plan. She’s got a shot at better working conditions for herself and her fellow workers and she’s going to see it through.
It bears repeating that in this movie, there is no friendship or camaraderie among the wealthy elite few. But there are so many more of us than there are of them. And when the chips are down, when the working poor are pushed hard enough, we’ll support each other with the solidarity of shared hardship in a way the billionaires fundamentally can’t.
(Side note: It’s true serendipity that this movie just happened to come out on the same weekend as the largest political protest in American history.)
The film has a lot to say about class inequality, finding hope in shitty times, and the joy in simply being human. Even so, this movie has quite a few significant problems.
Easily the big one is the casting. Seth Rogen got cast in one of the two most important leading roles and he still can’t act. Compare that to Sandra Oh and Stephen McKinley Henderson — arguably the two most accomplished and talented actors in this entire cast — are both utterly wasted as a couple of angels.
Which brings us to Keanu Reeves. Sorry, but Reeves was hopelessly miscast in this one.
Sure, I get the logic in casting him. Reeves is handsome and approachable enough to be an angel. And he’s got this kind of otherworldly aura that might be a good fit for a divine messenger. Here’s the problem: That’s not Gabriel.
Gabriel is a fuckup. He’s immature, he’s stupid, and he reacts to everything like he’s experiencing it for the very first time. He’s a young and inexperienced angel who resents all the other angels for looking down on him because he doesn’t know how ignorant he really is and they all do. He is, as Arj himself so eloquently put it, “a budget guardian angel”.
This guy isn’t John Wick. He’s not even Neo or Johnny Utah. He’s Ted “Theodore” Logan, running late for class at San Dimas High. And nobody got the memo that Reeves can’t play a teenager anymore.
Seriously, this is a role that needed a late teens/early 20s actor. With all due respect, there are so many lines and jokes and character moments that don’t connect because they need that kind of clueless, neurotic, stoner delivery that Reeves could’ve pulled off 35 years ago. But now, Reeves can only bring the detached kind of zen calm that’s become his forte over the years. He’s clearly straining as hard as he can to fit that square peg into the round hole and it’s just not working.
Thus we have one capable actor who’s hopelessly miscast, against two other leading men who can’t act at all. That’s kind of a big fucking problem.
Easily the best thing that Good Fortune has going for it is the script. The script is amazing, a delightful twist on a classic fable, loaded with heart and intelligence in its examination of life in late stage capitalism. Ansari should’ve handed it off to a different director. Ansari still could’ve produced it — hell, he could’ve kept the leading role and it probably would’ve been okay. But as a director, Ansari leans far too heavily on cringe humor and he shows zero aptitude for casting (with the exception of Keke Palmer, she’s perfect where she is).
It’s not a bad movie by any stretch (certainly not for a debut filmmaker), but you won’t miss anything waiting for home video.