Lucky

On September last year, actor Harry Dean Stanton died at the age of 91 years old. If his career was made mostly of amazing supporting performances in films like Alien, The Last Temptation of the Christ and The Straight Story, his two best roles had him as the leading actor. In 1984's Paris, Texas (winner of Cannes' Palm d'Or), Stanton plays a man who takes the son he abandoned some years ago to see his lost mother, delivering one of the best monologues in film history. In Lucky, released this year, he is an old man who, after suffering a sudden faint, starts wondering if his life is about to come to an end.

What a privilege for Stanton to say goodbye with a film like this. one that lets him display his full talent as a testament of his work and his own life. Lucky is a very rare philosophical comedy, one that contains strong thoughts about existence, but that is told in such a light way that we get our brains thinking hard while we enjoy and laugh at this intelligent type of humor.

As a film, Lucky is very modest, but actor turned director John Carrol Lynch bets everything on the screenplay and his lead actor, while offering a correct mise-en-scéne. Stanton fills this small film with tons of warmth, creating a beautiful character that is round with virtues and faults, but that no matter what, we can't help to love him. By doing a character study, Lynch and Stanton make a study on something much bigger: the sense of life. It certainly is nihilistic, but we end up with the heart warmed by everything that happens in there, making an exam in our own life, and maybe finding that as pointless as life is, there are small (or big) details that make it all very worthy.