The Luckiest Man in America
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: R
Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes
Stars: Paul Walter Hauser, David Straithairn, Walton Goggins
Co-writer, Director: Samir Oliveros
Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
If TV game shows didn’t exist, someone would have had to invent them for the movies, where, in films like Slumdog Millionaire and Quiz Show, everyman combatants immerse themselves in greed, heartbreak, and stubborn determination with all the passion of figures in Greek drama.
Like most of those films, The Luckiest Man in America explores the limits of fair play through the eyes of a single player. But Luckiest Man also plays an even more complex game with its audience: challenging us to solve the puzzle of the enigmatic eccentric who occupies the contestant’s seat.
Press Your Luck never attained Jeopardy! or Wheel of Fortune-like status in the TV game show pantheon, despite having blatantly borrowed elements of both those classics. Yet the series holds its place in TV infamy: In 1984, an unassuming contestant by the name of Michael Larson stunned the audience — not to mention the show’s producers — by winning more than $100,000. This, at a time when a nice new stove was considered a Fabulous Grand Prize.
Larson’s strategy was unnervingly simple. One phase of the game involved contestants watching a rapidly flashing light randomly make its way around a large electronic game board and pressing a big red button to stop the light’s movement, hopefully on a big prize rather than the “Whammy,” a cartoon character who signified the player’s defeat in that round.
At least, the light pattern seemed random: As it turned out, Larson had videotaped dozens of Press Your Luck episodes and found it possible to memorize precisely when to press the button so as to avoid disaster.
Paul Walter Hauser, who embodied the maddening eccentricity of the falsely accused Atlanta Olympics bomber in Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell, has a way of creating quietly indelible characters. Here he’s in top form as Larson, an out-of-work Ohio ice cream man whose motivations for driving his truck from Ohio to Los Angeles are cloaked under his inscrutably reticent exterior. With his wild head of hair and mountain man beard, he’s the kind of guy whose ambitions — seething yet fatally unfocused — both drive and bedevil him.
He’s the ultimate outsider, which makes this the perfect first feature film project for Colombian co-writer/director Samir Oliveros, who has admitted in interviews his motivation for making the film paralleled many of those Larson expressed. Dissecting the pursuit of what passes for The American Dream as only a flummoxed newcomer can, Oliveros takes the story of that original one-hour broadcast and spins it into a corporate thriller as CBS executives and show staffers frantically scramble to figure out just how this dumpy guy is beating their carefully structured game. Chief among the behind-the-scenes adversaries is the show’s producer (David Strathairn), a self-serving show biz type who, in the course of an hour, alternately deflects blame for this guy’s success and takes credit for his emerging appeal.
The real-life Larson was an incurable con man who eventually died of throat cancer in Florida while on the run from the Securities and Exchange Commission, but here he’s a straight-up folk hero, turning The Man’s system against him; a guy who wants, like everyone else, nothing more than to be seen.
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