Lucky

Despite the quirky townsfolk and the always-appealing Stanton, this desert town-set film feels slow and, well, dry. The late, storied veteran actor plays an elderly man suddenly facing his own mortality and experiencing an existential crisis. Lucky meanders through his tiny town, interacting with the quirky residents, wondering whether there's any kind of objective truth to the universe or if it's just a collection of subjective realities. Yes, that's what the film is about. It straddles the line between slow-moving slice-of-life drama and surrealism, at times a cross between David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch. Will Lucky have an epiphany? Will anyone find the missing tortoise? What's behind that mysterious door? The answers, cinematically, are a collective shrug.

As it sounds, the film is somewhat in its own head. The script painstakingly reminds us on multiple occasions that its central question is one of "realism" -- that's realism as a philosophical concept, not a cinematic school, as Lucky contains some pretty heavy-handed symbolism (the obligatory red door, the phone calls without obvious participants on the other end, etc.). That's not to say there are no Lucky charms: It's generally amiable, Livingston's harmless lawyer has an affecting speech about a life-changing event, and Skerritt delivers a disturbing monologue about a war experience. But in his directorial debut, veteran character actor John Carroll Lynch has created a lightly genial atmosphere that can't quite get the script's heavy subject matter to float. The point seems to be that there are no definitive answers. That's hard to make dramatically involving. Perhaps the enduring memory of this film will be Stanton's impromptu singing of "Volver, Volver" with a mariachi band. The moment is a lovely keepsake of the longtime actor and singer, whose performances often left viewers with warm feelings.