The trailer for Aziz Ansari’s Good Fortune finds the actor-comedian playing a food-delivery driver who trades places with a tech bro played by Seth Rogen at the behest of a morose angel named Gabriel, played by Keanu Reeves.
The film, which Ansari wrote and directed, combines a few classic movie setups into a very modern critique of the modern-day economy: The people on top plunge into ice baths and have food delivered to them in hilltop mansions — while the people who deliver that same food find themselves struggling every day to survive.
To teach Ansari’s gig worker, Arj, that money isn’t the key to happiness, Gabriel manages to make him switch lives with tech entrepreneur Jeff.
“I tried to show him that wealth wouldn’t solve all his problems,” Gabriel tells another Angel, played by Sandra Oh.
“And?” she asks.
“It seems to have solved most of his problems.”
Gabriel has problems, too: His main job is keeping people from texting and driving, and he concedes that he’s considered something of a “budget guardian angel.”
Keke Palmer, meanwhile, plays a woman working at a big box store, who tells Ansari’s Ari: “You’re up here in this huge house. I’m fighting just to get by.”
“You’ll never believe me,” he says. “But I’ve been there.”
Yes, this is another movie where Hollywood millionaire empathize with the little guy. But at least it has a sense of humor about the whole thing, and has the good sense, like 1983’s Trading Places, to point out that wealth is sometimes a matter of luck — and being born to the right parents.
“I came from nothing! I’m self-made!” Rogen’s Jeff insists at one point — before admitting that his father was an orthopedic surgeon.
Besides Trading Places, there are element of the angel-movie classics It’s a Wonderful Life and Wings of Desire. But there’s also a welcome dose of absurdity, particularly in Reeves’ amusingly deadpan delivery.
Background on Good Fortune, Starring Keanu Reeves, Aziz Ansari, Seth Rogen and Keke Palmer
As good as Good Fortune looks, it had a complicated journey to becoming Ansari’s directorial debut.
In 2022, Ansari — best known as a standup comedians and one of the stars of the long-running NBC sitcom Parks & Recreation — was directing the film Being Mortal, adapted from Dr. Atul Gawande’s 2014 nonfiction book Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End.
But when Bill Murray, one of the stars of the film, was accused of inappropriate onset behavior with a female crew member, production stopped. That led Ansari to move on to what he had planned as his next project, Good Fortune.
Also Read: Severance, The Penguin, The Studio and The White Lotus Lead Emmy Nominations
The cast of Being Mortal had also included Rogen and Palmer, who moved with Ansari onto the new project.
Murray later said he was trying to make a joke by kissing the crew member while both were wearing masks, per Covid protocols.
“It’s something that I had done to someone else before, and I thought it was funny, and every time it happened, it was funny,” he told The New York Times. “I was wearing a mask, and I gave her a kiss, and she was wearing a mask. It wasn’t like I touched her, but it was just, I gave her a kiss through a mask. And she wasn’t a stranger.
Main image: Keanu Reeves as Gabriel, Seth Rogen as Jeff, and Aziz Ansari as Ari in Good Fortune. Photo Credit: Eddy Chen. Courtesy of Lionsgate.