Good Fortune Is It’s A Wonderful Life For The Gig Economy
Aziz Ansari’s feature debut is an impossibly earnest supernatural comedy.
Living in Los Angeles at this late-late stage of capitalism is akin to one long humiliation ritual. Sure, it’s hard to live anywhere right now, but the disparity between the haves (who’ve been cannibalizing creative industries for decades) and have-nots (y’know, the creatives carrying the industry on their backs) has never been quite so wide. No one can sustain a job in their dream field anymore; no one can afford even the most modest lifestyle. As Aziz Ansari claims in the opening moments of his directorial debut, Good Fortune, the American Dream is no more. It’d take an act of divine intervention to deliver his hero from his fate — but even that might not be enough to fix what’s wrong with the world.
A documentary editor in a career drought, Ansari’s Arj has long slipped past rock bottom. He did everything right — the college degree, the honest job — yet the only consistent gigs he can get now are the ones he finds on the labor app TaskSargeant. He stands in line for people at restaurants; he assembles furniture and babysits. None of it is enough to secure an apartment, so he sleeps in his car and showers at the gym. He can’t even hold down a job as an assistant for an airheaded venture capitalist, Jeff (Seth Rogen), who seems easygoing enough, until Arj charges dinner to his company credit card.
After losing yet another promising job, Arj is about ready to give up on life — and if it weren’t for his “budget guardian angel,” he might have put himself out of his misery a long time ago. Gabriel (Keanu Reeves) is a lower-level celestial being: He’s responsible for stopping countless Angelenos from texting, driving, and perishing in car accidents, but his jurisdiction ends there. In Arj, however, he sees a lost soul who’s lost all zest for life, all hope for the future. Good Fortune follows his quest to reconnect Arj with his purpose... but that’s easier said than done with all chances of success seeming to dwindle by the second.
Good Fortune is toeing a careful line between cynical satire and existential enthusiasm. It’s got no love for the gig economy, our growing reliance on generative AI, or the wage gap — but an empty “eat the rich” satire this is not. It’s a story penned by a filmmaker that’s known, or at least understands, economic hardship, and even seems to carry some guilt for the privileges he enjoys now as a well-paid comedian. Ansari weaves a realistic, high-concept fable that takes a hard look at an uncomfortable truth. It pulls very few punches at the outset, but there’s only so far this story can go before slipping into the same despair that fuels its lead.
Gabriel learns this the hard way as he attempts to teach Arj the importance of gratitude and perspective. Against the wishes of his supervisor, head angel Martha (Sandra Oh), Gabe decides to swap Arj’s life with Jeff’s, naively thinking this brief dalliance will show him that money can’t solve every problem. The gag is, a net worth as massive as Jeff’s does cover a ton of inconveniences. After a week living it up in the Hollywood Hills, Arj is understandably loath to go back to his old life. His reluctance doesn’t quite throw the balance of the universe in jeopardy, but it does cost Gabriel his angelic credentials. Now a human with no prospects or any understanding of the world, Gabriel is forced to team up with Jeff to survive the streets in LA while Arj hoards his unmerited wealth.
Ansari’s debut is equal parts Trading Places and It’s A Wonderful Life, but it functions best as a 21st-century riff on the former. Reeves and Rogen make a divine comedic match as their characters each receive their own rude awakening. Watching an oblivious technocrat learn how hard the other half lives will never not be satisfying, and Rogen’s performance offers catharsis, sympathy, and ridicule in equal measure. Reeves, meanwhile, is in rare form as Gabriel. His innocent “dum dum,” as he calls himself in the film, is essentially coming of age at an expedited rate. He discovers the rapturous pleasure of burgers and milkshakes, and the debilitating reality of a skimmed paycheck, with the same soft-spoken wonder and stiff, straight-faced physical comedy.
Good Fortune gives Reeves his best comedic performance yet.
The only place Good Fortune struggles is in fleshing out Arj’s side of the story, arguing for a return to the status quo. That Arj doesn’t want to go back to his old life, and moves heaven and earth to evade Gabriel and Jeff, is the film’s most understandable thread. Would you want to go back to a world where you’re crushed by debt, unpaid parking tickets, and an inescapable sense of doom and gloom? Would you embrace a future where all that’s in store is a dead-end job working for an Amazon-esque delivery service, where you know you’ll be forced to move back in with your parents?
Gabriel argues that Arj can’t just say he’ll switch back with Jeff; he has to want to go back to his old life. He has to have hope for the future. But aside from a promising romance with Elena (a charming Keke Palmer), a plucky aspiring carpenter trying to organize a union at her part-time job, there’s honestly no real reason to return. It’s one thing to say it’ll get better eventually, to condemn AI-run businesses and shrinking wages with fiery monologues. But the onus is still on Arj to learn a lesson, even after Good Fortune spends half its runtime poking holes in it.
The film comes dangerously, delightfully close to suggesting a new path forward, especially for a character like Jeff. It might not make it to the radical theories on wealth that it’s reaching towards, but Good Fortune does go farther than any of its peers in commiserating with the working class.
