Paul Walter Hauser is best known for portraying one of the unluckiest men in America, the title character of Clint Eastwood's Richard Jewell. Perhaps it's only fitting then that he should now find himself headlining The Luckiest Man in America.
The film sees Hauser play Michael Larson, an ice cream truck driver who made US TV history in 1984 by winning the biggest ever jackpot (over $110,000) on the popular game show 'Press Your Luck'. Luck had very little to do with Larson's success though. Poring over VHS recordings of the show, Larson had worked out that the show's supposedly random game of chance wasn't random at all, but actually based on as few as five patterns, the sequences of which he had memorised.
In this heavily dramatised account of the taping of Larson's two episodes, the infamous contestant is portrayed initially as a classic Paul Walter Hauser "type," a put-upon working class schlub who earns our sympathy as the little man battling the powers that be. But as the narrative progresses our view of Larson shifts as he morphs into a creepy, manipulative man who appears to have a closet full of potentially disturbing skeletons.
At first glance The Luckiest Man in America might seem like a cousin of Robert Redford's Quiz Show, which similarly documented a real life game show scandal. But in its increasingly unnerving tone it has more in common with films like Network, Christine and Anna Kendrick's recent directorial debut Woman of the Hour; movies that examine darker chapters in the chronicles of American reality TV.
Colombian director Samir Oliveros heads a South American crew behind the camera, lending the film a distinctively Latin touch of surreal camp, enhanced by a disruptively discordant jazz funk score by John Carroll Kirby. I can't help but wonder if Oliveros was inspired by Spanish artist Javi de Castro, who documented the Press Your Luck scandal in his 2017 graphic novel 'Larson - The Luckiest Man in the World'.
There's a sense that the CBS studio, with its maze of corridors and colourful sound stages, is a sort of limbo in which Larson finds himself trapped. In the movie's oddest segment, Larson accidentally wanders into a taping of a talk show, where the host (Johnny Knoxville) invites him onto the stage. Elsewhere Larson believes he's being chased by the police, only to realise they're simply uniformed extras from a cop show being filmed on the lot. Blending the cheesy smarm of '80s TV with an increasingly unsettling feeling that something awful is going to happen, The Luckiest Man in America is surprisingly similar to the recent cult horror hit Late Night with the Devil, complete with a smarmy host in a bad wig, played by a shit-eating Walton Goggins.
The behind the scenes drama resembles The Larry Sanders Show as execs bicker about how to handle Larson and attempt to throw their colleagues under the bus. Shamier Anderson and David Strathairn are respectively great as the casting director who initially rejected Larson and the executive producer who fell for his folksy charm, the two men finding themselves in the network's firing line over the developing fiasco.
As the show's producers begin to use underhanded tactics to disrupt Larson's winning streak, The Luckiest Man in America becomes a parable on the falsehoods of the American dream. Larson technically isn't cheating. He's worked hard to figure out how to make money, how to win, but he comes to learn that the ultimately it's the house always wins, even when you take their money. Even though Larson walks away with a sum of money he could only have dreamed of, it comes at an emotional cost, and by the time the studio dims its applause lights his spirit has been broken, the system having well and truly reminded him which lane his ice cream truck belongs in.
Directed by: Samir Oliveros
Starring: Paul Walter Hauser, David Strathairn, Walton Goggins, Shamier Anderson, Haley Bennett, Johnny Knoxville, Maisie Williams
