Review of “The Luckiest Man in America”: With Paul Walter Hauser

“No one ends up in my chair by mistake.” That's what is said at the end of the game show Michael Larson (Paul Walter Hauser) The luckiest man in America from a talk show host (Johnny Knoxville) after stopping the recording.

The statement, while reassuring, isn’t literally true; Michael absolutely stumbled into this particular room by mistake. But it reflects a desire on the film’s part to make sense of Larson’s real story, to glean from it some deeper wisdom about her character or ours, to make it something more than a strange thing that happened once.

The problem is that it's never entirely clear what Michael AND what is he doing here, or in fact what are we all. As a piece of atmosphere, the film directed by Samir Oliveros The luckiest man in America It’s very evocative, full of a retro feel tinged with dread or dreaminess. But as a character study or narrative, it’s too rooted in its particular locale to extend its impact beyond that.

Oliveros and Maggie Briggs' script chronicles events that may be familiar to Gen X and older viewers, but less so to younger ones. In 1984, the part-quiz, part-chance competition Try your luck is the hottest game show on TV, or at least “the most Vegas game show in America,” as its smiling host (Walton Goggins, one of many famous names vastly overqualified for the modest supporting roles he's given) put it. One afternoon, at a routine casting call, Michael, an ice cream truck driver from Ohio, walks in with sappy memories of watching the show every morning with his family, complete with bacon and eggs.

As played by Hauser, Michael comes across as, well, a quintessential Paul Walter Hauser character. He’s instantly awkward in a way that, depending on the situation, could read as slightly pathetic, vaguely sinister, or disarmingly sweet. (The real Michael appears to have been a bit smoother, at least based on the obligatory bit of archive footage inserted into the credits.) Though he’s no one’s idea of ​​an obvious star, with his rumpled clothes and battered ride, he exudes a knock-out affability that convinces creator Bill Carruthers (David Strathairn) to cast him in the next day’s episode, despite early warning signs that Michael’s Midwestern naiveté might itself be a facade.

After all, nothing else at CBS's Television City is quite what it seems. When Michael arrives for his taping, PA Sylvia (Maisie Williams) leads the contestants past sets that have been dressed up to look like a prison or a Hong Kong alley. The effect is both magical and a little disorienting, as if she's leading them into a fantasy realm. When they arrive at their destination, the Try your luck set seems simultaneously of the world but separate from it. It's not that reality doesn't matter here, but rather that it's filtered through layers of artificiality and bent around its own arcane rules.

At first, Michael looks pretty much what you'd expect. He fails a few trivia questions, stumbles through small talk with his fellow players, loses a little money on an early round. Then he has a series of successes that, over the course of hours, go from exciting to improbable to downright impossible. In the control room, Bill and his producers go from happy to furious to terrified, worried that his ballooning prize will bankrupt the entire production. The audience thinks otherwise. To them, Michael isn't just an extraordinarily lucky guy or a surreptitiously manipulative guy. He becomes, as one producer observes, “the little guy who comes in and takes the guy down.”

The luckiest man in AmericaThe long list of executive producers includes Mary director Pablo Larraín, and you can feel his influence in the way he swaps the usual clichés of biopics for a more dreamy and subjective experience. As designed by Lulú Salgado, the Try your luck set is a claustrophobic labyrinth of narrow corridors, blinding lights, and false fronts. Andrés Velásquez’s sound design periodically distorts the hum of electronics or the chatter of a crowd into a low rumble, as if some creature might approach from the bowels of the earth. Every so often, a red devil mascot named Whammy materializes silently in a corner, like a lurking reaper.

While nothing here is explicitly surreal, these artistic choices make the studio feel like a kind of purgatory. As Michael amasss a record-breaking portfolio, he faces a reckoning of sorts. Fearing for their jobs, staff members break into his pickup truck looking for clues to his true history or motives. They dig up old enemies and bitter memories in an attempt to undermine his confidence or dangle promises of fame and fortune to manipulate him. Michael’s weaknesses are exposed, like his arrogance and casual disregard for rules. So are his strengths, like the ingenuity that allowed him to see through the game’s mechanics in a way no one else had before. Hauser delves into every nuance of Michael’s turbulent emotional states, from self-satisfied glee to debilitating anxiety.

Back in the talk show chair, Michael confesses the real reason why he came Try your luck is to reconnect with his estranged wife (Haley Bennett) and daughter: “All I want to do is have breakfast with my family, but the only way I can do that is if I'm on their TV.” Being seen on air, however, is not the same as forming a genuine emotional connection. The luckiest man in America ultimately refuses to pass judgment on Michael, offering neither simple encouragement nor stern moralism. Instead, we are left to draw our own conclusions. But in its stylistic ambiguity, the film leaves us too little to really think about. The moment Michael is no longer on the screen, he might as well cease to exist.