Lucky

“Lucky” opens with a tortoise crawling across the desert, an image director John Carroll Lynch strains to mirror his titular protagonist (Harry Dean Stanton), a 90 year old loner who, wonder of wonders, is still going. But Lucky’s gait, which we see not long after, is less slow and steady than aggressive and brisk, as much as it can be for a man of his age, which is evocative of his all-important daily routine – yoga, cigarettes, coffee, more coffee at the local diner while dueling with the crossword, errands, a Bloody Mary and conversation at his preferred watering hole. That routine will have to be futzed up, of course, and so it is, though the film never really reflects this in its tone or narrative, still coming across pretty neat and orderly, where the screenplay by Drago Sumonja and Logan Sparks lines up a series of encounters so convenient they feel cosmically underwritten. Then again, the script is admirable its refusal to truck in conventional reveals. There are no secrets lurking, no big epiphanies waiting. When Lucky meets a former fellow marine at the diner (Tom Skerritt) who has a war story to tell, the scene is not any kind of narrative trigger, just a pause for reflection.

The movie’s inciting incident, if you can call it that, is a fainting spell that sends Lucky to a jocular doctor (Ed Begley Jr.) who actually confirm his patient’s unhealthy habits might karmically do more good than harm, intrinsically suggesting that his patient has lived a life free from regret. Ultimately the fainting spell has no explanation, another cosmic underwriting, a means to try and make Lucky take stock before he inevitably merges with the infinite. This is underlined by an insurance salesman, played by Ron Livingston with a mustache that comes on a little too sleazily archetypal, trying to convince Lucky to get his end of life affairs in order. Lucky is not interested in this, reasoning that when you’re dead you’re dead.

“Lucky” challenges that viewpoint, a bit too forcefully at times, such as a montage set to Johnny Cash’s “I See Darkness” that feels like a music video suddenly decided to set up shop in the midst of a movie. Befitting most of “Lucky”, it finds this questioning more in Stanton’s countenance, like his laconically authoritative speaking voice, where rather than adding a period to statements of act he just trails off, that deliberate dead air leaving a little space to wonder about the certainty of his knowledge. He often makes these pronouncements amidst his drinking buddies, paradoxical given his stance as a loner, including Paulie (James Darren), introduced by explaining how he met the bar’s owner (Beth Grant), the love of his life. This, it is made clear, is not his first re-telling of the story, which he is lightly ridiculed for, though not too much, because the scene is intended to elicit something more akin to contentment.

That’s where Lucky seems to end up too. Granted, it’s a sensation difficult to capture, particularly when there really are not any rivers to cross, though Lynch seems to try to get a little mystical with it at the end, pairing Lucky with the image of cactuses standing tall and proud in the desert. It is seen better in an earlier moment when he attends the birthday party of the son of the woman running the five and dime. Suddenly, Lucky stands up and joins the mariachi band in song. If heretofore we had no inkling that Lucky could even sing, well, that is what makes it so powerful, evoking the fullness of a life lived, where so many skills can sometimes be made to lay dormant, until the moment so blindingly presents itself, and Lucky, like Harry Dean Stanton, who died a couple weeks before this movie’s release, gets a chance to shine.

In Memoriam: Harry Dean Stanton

The first time I saw Harry Dean Stanton in a movie he looked old. He was old, of course, in a manner of speaking, past 50, because this was “Alien” where I dare say many of my generation first saw Stanton, and even though that resplendent sci-hi haunted house was a high-profile Ridley Scott joint it was nevertheless willing to employ older odd ducks like Stanton rather than a bunch of up and coming bland, pretty faces. Thank god too. As the years have gone by it is the bitching of Harry Dean Stanton and Yaphet Kotto, playing a couple grunts who just want to get paid, as emblematic of a Crisis of Confidence as 2121, that has stayed with me just as much as Tom Skerritt’s fateful foray into that vent. And that bitching was just as indicative of Stanton's place in the pantheon as an indelible character actor. He was not just there waiting in the wings to get picked off. And though he did get picked off, naturally, he had to, the moment was as much about his unforgettable visage — a countenance that cut like a Merle Haggard song, like it had seen some shit — as the alien itself. With that face, Stanton knew he didn’t have to scream or such; no, he just had to stand there and look up.

Harry Dean Stanton died last week at the age of 91, which for someone who always felt old somehow still feels too soon. Even so, that age invokes his long career, one that began not on the movie screen but at sea, serving as a cook in the US Navy during WWII. He began making acting appearances in just about every TV show you ever heard of in the 50s and 60s, eventually gravitating to film, in uncredited roles and bit parts, though he could still make an impression, like “Cool Hand Luke”, where even if Stanton was unknown director Stuart Rosenberg could so clearly see something in the actor’s face that he zoomed in on Stanton as he sang Just A Closer Walk With Thee.” (If you’re an unknown getting a close-up in a Paul Newman movie, man, you’ve got It.)

If his character actor abilities and unlikely visage made him perfect for the 1970s, in something of an upset he made his most indelible mark in the 1980s, wandering out of the desert as Wim Wenders’ “Paris, Texas” (1984) opened, stricken and searching for salvation. Even if it was his first leading role, he had been around so long, deep into his 50s, that he nevertheless never played the part with something to prove, which added to the character, enigmatic and silent and then, gradually, repentant without any people pleasing petulance. That same year he also starred in the cult classic “Repo Man”, more in support yet still taking center stage, and appearing in John Milius’s “Red Dawn” in a walk off cameo as the father of the hero boys suddenly thrust into the center of WWIII. If being forced to shout “Avenge me!” was disappointing overkill dictated by the screenplay, in the moments leading up to it Stanton’s solemn tough love, spoken plainly, still winningly came through. It was a different kind of fatherly affection then what he played two years later in, of all things, “Pretty in Pink”, as the broken-down elder to Molly Ringwald, where she took care of him as more than he took care of her, a sad sack vulnerability completely apart from his “Red Dawn” unsentimentality.

Stanton was famously reticent off screen, at least about the topic of himself, as Bilge Ebiri’s interview with him four years ago noted, but he brought that silence with him to the screen. When Ebiri asked about “Paris, Texas” Stanton replied: “I related to the fact that he didn’t talk for a half an hour in the film”, deeming it “The syndrome of being silent.” Indeed, in “The Straight Story” (1999), Stanton played Lyle Straight, the brother of Richard Farnsworth’s Alvin, who rode his tractor 240 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin just to see his long-estranged flesh and blood one last time with both of them teetering on death’s door. Because their meeting cannot arrive until the climax, Stanton is barely in the film, and while another movie might have made time for a Big Speech or a Meaningful Conversation, director David Lynch valued The Syndrome of Being Silent and simply let Stanton’s presence trigger the catharsis. Indeed, a man who lived so long and did so much and who rarely, right up until the end, ever seemed without a cigarette, always demonstrated, better than most, the value of screen of moderation.