A mild life-swap comedy

 

 If a rich young man were forced to change places with a gig worker, would he be a better person because of the experience? And would the struggling gig worker learn that his life already had value?

   What? You thought a comedy starring Seth Rogen, Keanu Reeves, and Aziz Ansari, who also wrote and directed, would endorse a lavish lifestyle in which one of the rich guy's biggest challenges consists of leaving the sauna for a cold plunge? 

   Nah, spreading its Capraesque values as thick as peanut butter, Good Fortune casts Reeves as Gabriel, a lower-ranking angel whose job involves saving the lives of people who are texting while  driving, sort of a heavenly being turned into a public service message.

    But Reeves’ Gabriel not only wants to save lives; he hopes to change them.

     Through a series of contrivances and missteps, Gabriel arranges for Ansari's Arj — an aspiring film editor stuck in gig world hell — to trade places with Jeff (Rogen), a Los Angeles entrepreneur with a watch collection whose value might rival the budget of a small nation.

     At first, Arj believes he’s had the ultimate stroke of luck. He thinks that money might help him impress a young woman (Keke Palmer) who works at a hardware megastore, where he had a part-time job.

     Besides, who can blame him for being happy that he no longer needs to sleep in his car.

      After Gabriel's life-swapping mistake, his supervising angel (Sandra Oh) strips him of his wings and turns him into a human being. The best part of the comedy involves Reeves'  transformation from a naive and slightly dopey angel into a human who develops a love for tacos, dancing, and bro-style companionship.

      Meant to be temporary, the life-swap extends when Arj decides he doesn’t want to return to a life of thankless hustling and poverty. For his part, Jeff would like to get his life back.

      More attuned to chuckles than belly laughs, the rest of Good Fortune involves attempts to restore Jeff and Arj to their original lives and allow Gabriel to resume angelic life.

        Perhaps to tone down the movies's cornier  aspects, Ansari introduces mild critiques of income disparity, careless capitalism, and status-oriented consumption.  He even adds a bit of activism when Palmer’s Elena tries to unionize her co-workers. At another point, a gaggle of gig workers walks off a job site.

      If Good Fortune is intended as an assault on heartless capitalism, it's not an especially provocative one, but that same benign quality helps keep the comedy from grating.

     Ansari doesn’t work with too heavy a hand, so even the bits that don’t succeed (an over-the-top 40th birthday party, for example) land softly. Ansari's best achievement involves coaxing an amusing performance from Reeves, who's more like Ted (from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure) than either his Neo or John Wick characters.

      I don't give movies stars, but if I did, I'd tag Good Fortune as the quintessential ** 1/2 star entertainment, a predictable comedy that delivers its message with bit of amusement and without too much hectoring.

Much to admire about 'Rabbit Hole'

Rabbit Hole has some great moments, but never springs to full heartbreaking life.

Rabbit Hole, director John Cameron Mitchell’s big-screen adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer Prize-wining 2007 play, is tasteful, unsentimental and often beautifully written.

That’s saying something because the screenplay – also by Lindsay-Abaire -- deals with a subject that easily could have devolved into hand-wringing melodrama: a New York couple attempts to cope with the death of their 4-year-old son.

We meet Howie and Becca – played by Aaron Eckhart and Nicole Kidman -- eight months after their son Danny’s death. I won’t say what happened to Danny because Mitchell plays the movie’s emotional cards slowly and wisely, which should come as a relief to anyone who fears that Rabbit Hole will deliver an emotional clobbering.

Tension arises from the different ways in which Howie and Becca attempt to deal with their son's death. Howie watches a cherished video of his son on his smart phone. It helps him remember happier times. Howie’s untroubled by physical reminders of his son’s existence – drawings pasted to the refrigerator, for example. He seems to treasure them.

Becca, on the other hand, hardly can abide the residual paraphernalia of her son’s lost life. She’s carrying the departed Danny in her head, and it’s all she can do to move on.

Of course, both Howie and Becca attempt to maintain a normal facade in the face of unspeakable tragedy. They put up a brave middle-class front. Their house is neat. Howie seems to be functioning well enough at work. He’s liable to return home in the evening and find Becca puttering over dinner.

Kidman, nearly unrecognizable in the movie’s early scenes, steers clear of any suggestion of glamour, but her portrayal of the sometimes icy Becca not only holds her character’s emotions in check, but also keeps us at bay, and, I think, limits Rabbit Hole’s ability to crack open our hearts. It’s almost as if Mitchell and Lindsay-Abaire have studied the mathematics of grief and allowed their calculations to inform the movie’s structure and all of its various subplots.

Becca’s younger sister (Tammy Blanchard) is involved in a relationship and recently has become pregnant. Both Becca and Howie attend a support group where Howie meets Gaby (Sandra Oh), a woman whose grieving style may be closer to his than Becca’s. Becca’s mother (Dianne Wiest) takes comfort in religion. She also has dealt with the death of a child, an adult son who succumbed to drugs.

In what may be the movie’s best scene, Wiest and Kidman talk about the way grief never ends, but morphs into something easily recalled and somehow bearable: The awful weight of it lessens with the passage of time.

The relationship between Becca and a high school student (no, it’s not at all kinky or sexual) begins in mystery, but eventually assumes an unsatisfying air of contrivance.

Rabbit Hole certainly has its moments. We’re watching a couple of decent people who must learn how to continue living in the face of the unthinkable, but I couldn’t entirely shake the feeling that I was witness to a very good rehearsal of material that had yet to spring fully to life and which generally left me on the outside looking in.

Put another way: I don’t believe that Mitchell has found a way to bring Rabbit Hole from the stage to the screen with all its power intact.