Good Fortune

A lot of one’s experience of Aziz Ansari’s feature directorial debut, Good Fortune, might rest on what they think of him as a storyteller. A stand-up comedian/actor/writer/director for nearly two decades now, Ansari turned to direction with the Netflix series, Master of None, a semi-autobiographical take on his experience as a brown actor in America, as he goes through the typical ups and downs on both personal and professional fronts. Co-created with Alan Yang, Master of None, in my opinion, is a sublime meditation on modern American society, as we see it through the eyes of Dev (a fictitious version of Ansari himself), and its commentary on immigrant parents, dating culture, and thorny issues like sexual harassment on public transport or at the workplace – but they’re dealt with his customary light touch. Like most comedians working, Ansari has this tendency to bleed out the theatrics of the most unsettling moments in life – stressing on how most life-changing moments can seem mundane in real life. This gentle rebuke as a storytelling choice is instantly recognisable as something from Ansari’s canon.

Good Fortune plays out a bit like a smart-alecky Aziz Ansari comedy sketch. A skit-like one-liner — what if a well-meaning but incompetent “budget angel” body-swaps a wealthy white guy and a miserable brown guy? — is pan-fried with a series of thematic keywords: gig economy, American dream, immigrant struggle, racial biases, capitalist greed. It’s a deadpan spoof that counts on looking like a deadpan spoof; even the sincerity is supposed to sound designed and clunky. It has the narrative scale of a gag, too. As a film, it doesn’t know where to go after the social gimmick wears off; it just fizzles into the sort of artificial resolution that, if I didn’t know any better, passes off as image-renovating and self-righteous tripe. The film is fun when Keanu Reeves turns earnestness and bad writing into an art form. But as a Barbie-styled comment on modern American society, it comes across as performative and dishonest. Look Ma, (no) Wings!