movies Lucky
A
boney old guy in sagging drawers, cowboy boots and a hat watering a cactus plant. Not a classically dramatic image for a movie poster. But then, the old guy happens to be Harry Dean Stanton. And the movie was conceived by friends as a vehicle for celebrating the iconic actor. All things considered, the graphic is picture-perfect. Stanton was 89 when he shot Lucky and died at 91, a couple of weeks before it hit theaters. Few actors, however great, get a sendoff as funny, touching and loving as this one. It’s clear in every frame that the star realized what a gift he’d been given. The directorial debut of actor John Carroll Lynch (Fargo), the picture does a lot with a little. As Stanton’s buddy Charles Bukowski was fond of saying, “Genius may be the ability to say a complicated thing in a simple way.” Collaborating with their subject, allowing him to weave details from his life into their script, screenwriters Drago Sumonja and Logan Sparks come stunningly close to meeting that standard. Lucky opens with shots of the Arizona desert; not long after, it follows the title character as he traverses the terrain on one of his daily pilgrimages into town. This, of course, is a reference to the opening scene of
Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984), in which Stanton gave the performance of which he claimed to be most proud. Instead of a hawk, we glimpse a tortoise shuffling through the brush. Its name is President Roosevelt. More on that shortly. Lucky lives a life defined by simple routine: coffee and a crossword at the diner, TV in the afternoon, then Bloody Marias at Elaine’s after dark. The barflies include the owner (Beth Grant), her husband, Paulie (James Darren), and the dapper Howard, played with obvious affection by David Lynch. The talk leapfrogs among philosophy, religion and the distressing disappearance of Howard’s pet tortoise and lifemate. “He affected me!” Over 88 minutes, the cycle repeats, with several standout moments. After a fall, Lucky visits his doctor (Ed Begley Jr.), who advises him not to quit smoking. He declares Lucky a “scientific anomaly” endowed with the rare opportunity to live as long as he has and remain cogent enough to “witness what you’re going through, examine it ... and accept it.” Tom Skerritt reunites with his Alien castmate as a vet who swaps stories one morning in the diner. Lucky tells a few about his days in the Navy (all true). Skerritt appears convincingly haunted as his character recalls
FOND FAREWELL The directorial debut of actor John Carroll Lynch offers a tender send-off for one of the greatest who ever lived.
landing on Okinawa and watching the Japanese throw their children off cliffs to save them from mistreatment by the marines. When Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described the five stages of dying, she left out a big one: listening to Johnny Cash in the middle of the night. The director is not so careless. A scene in which “I See a Darkness” plays as Lucky ponders the future says it all. This is a wistful, wise and fearless film. The writing is remarkable, each performance a compact marvel. Tim Suhrstedt’s lensing elevates the ragged landscape to the
level of a character as weather-beaten as its star. Almost. Stanton’s career spanned from Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956) to Cool Hand Luke (1967) to “Big Love” (2010) to this year’s “Twin Peaks: The Return.” Without a minute to spare, the movie’s creators tailormade him the role of a lifetime. We who get to witness his final lead performance are the ones who should count ourselves lucky. RI C K KI S O N AK
76 MOVIES
SEVEN DAYS
10.25.17-11.01.17
SEVENDAYSVT.COM
Geostorm
I
t’s difficult to enjoy a disaster movie about extreme weather in the wake of a summer of extreme weather. Difficult, too, to enjoy a film premised on the reality of climate change without getting distracted by bitter thoughts about the current political climate. None of that is Geostorm’s fault. What is its fault is that it utterly fails in its one apparent aim: to provide a silly disaster-based diversion. Dean Devlin, who wrote and produced Independence Day and Godzilla, makes his feature directorial debut with this tale of geoengineering gone wrong. Setting numerous scenes on the International Space Station, he and cowriter Paul Guyot seem to have hoped to combine the terrestrial destruction of ID4 with the vertiginous wonders of Gravity. Instead, they give us a meat-and-potatoes conspiracy thriller with predictable twists, stock characters and an all-too-parsimonious serving of catastrophe. Geostorm takes place in the near future, when extreme weather has finally induced humanity to take climate action. Because this is a movie, that means encasing the Earth in a nifty-looking network of satellites that control the weather. In the venerable disaster-movie tradition of hunky scientists, Gerard Butler plays hunky satellite designer Jake Lawson. Fired from the project for being too much of a maverick, he cedes command to his younger brother, Max (Jim Sturgess), a schmoozy State De-
WAVE OF DISCONTENT Rio falls prey to weather tampering in an over-the-top scene that is, sadly, not representative of Devlin’s dull disaster film.
partment official. But three years later, two satellites go on the fritz, zapping Afghanistan with a flash-freeze and turning Hong Kong into an inferno. Jake is sent to the ISS to find the problem, while Max and his Secret Service agent girlfriend (Abbie Cornish) begin to uncover a high-level conspiracy. Could the malfunctions have something to do with the impending transfer of power over the satellites from the U.S. to an international committee? Such geopolitical questions take a back seat to far less compel-
ling personal ones: Will Jake return safely from space to hug his precocious daughter (Talitha Bateman)? Will the two brothers stop snarking on each other and bond long enough to save the planet? Schmaltzy character arcs are disasterflick boilerplate, so we could forgive them if only Geostorm had more disasters. For better or worse, these movies exist to feed viewers’ appetites for grand-scale digital destruction: national monuments laid waste, whole continents in ruins.
But when it’s time for Devlin to bring the main course, he just keeps offering us amuse-bouches. One brief glimpse of tornados in Mumbai or beach babes freezing in Rio, and then we’re back to Washington, D.C., skulduggery or brotherly bickering. The film keeps teasing us with global spectacle only to return us to scenes of people sneaking around offices or tensely videoconferencing. And it’s not smart enough to make any of that interesting. Geostorm only had one job: to make us feel the gut-wrenching, existential terror of weaponized weather. That shouldn’t be hard; watching the Weather Channel is already a pretty scary experience. But the movie doesn’t present enough of the on-theground, facing-death perspective to fill us with dread. It doesn’t even have the saving grace of so many disaster movies: camp. The closest the script comes to self-awareness is a throwaway line that seems designed to explain why Butler and Sturgess keep flubbing their American accents. What Geostorm does have is an anti-jingoist, pro-internationalist thrust that feels practically daring these days — at least until one takes into account the indispensability of international box office to Hollywood’s bottom line. Neither that nor anything else is a reason to weather this tempest of tedium. MARGO T HARRI S O N