Lucky (2017)

Lucky arrives with a résumé that would tempt any classifier toward optimism: a ninety-year-old atheist protagonist, a desert town off the map, a supporting cast of oddballs circling the grave. The temptation passes quickly. John Carroll Lynch's directorial debut is a quiet character study, and the quiet is the point. Harry Dean Stanton wanders through Arizona buying milk and cigarettes, falls over, receives a clean bill of health from a doctor who seems faintly disappointed by it. The film has no thesis to deliver and no congregation to address. It watches an old man run out of time and finds the running out tolerable.

The supporting players are drawn from the character-actor wing of the profession, and their presence goes unremarked. Barry Shabaka Henley tends bar. Beth Grant runs the diner. Nobody explains who they are or why it matters that they are there. The closest the film comes to a sermon is Lucky's late monologue at Elaine's, where he announces that everything goes away, that we are left with nothing, and that the correct response to nothing is a smile. It is a spiritual claim, not a political one. Earlier, a Marine veteran recounts a Pacific beachhead and a child smiling amid the carnage, a detail offered as horror and mystery, not as an argument about empire.

This is a film about death, loneliness, a runaway tortoise named President Roosevelt, and Liberace on VHS. Its politics are the politics of a man who never married and has stopped expecting the world to explain itself. There is no representation arithmetic at work, no identity scaffolding, no environmental conscience, no economic grievance, no lecture. The camera holds on Stanton's face and lets him do the work. We are left with a modest, well-made elegy for a performer, released two weeks after his death, and it earns its sentiment honestly. Zero on every modern index. The film is not indifferent to the culture. It is simply older than it.