“No one ends up in my chair by mistake.” So game show contestant Michael Larson (Paul Walter Hauser) is told late in The Luckiest Man in America by a talk show host (Johnny Knoxville) after he interrupts his taping.
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The statement, though reassuring, isn’t true in the literal sense; Michael has absolutely stumbled into this particular room by mistake. But it reflects a desire on the film’s part to impart meaning to Larson’s real-life story — to glean from it some deeper wisdom about his character or ours, to turn it into something more than just a weird thing that happened once.
Problem is, it’s never totally clear what Michael is doing here, or indeed what any of us are. As a mood piece, the Samir Oliveros-directed The Luckiest Man in America is plenty evocative, full of retro flair tinged with dread or dreaminess. But as a character study or a narrative, it’s too rooted in its particular place to extend its impact beyond it.
The screenplay by Oliveros and Maggie Briggs recounts events that might be familiar to viewers Gen X or older, but less so to younger ones. In 1984, the part-trivia, part-chance competition Press Your Luck is the hottest game show on TV — or at least “the most Vegas game in America,” as put by its grinning host (Walton Goggins, one of many famous names vastly overqualified for the modest supporting roles they’re given). Into a routine casting call one afternoon walks Michael, an Ohio ice-cream truck driver effusing sappy memories of watching the series every morning with his family over bacon and eggs.
As played by Hauser, Michael comes across like, well, a quintessential Paul Walter Hauser character. He’s immediately awkward in a way that, depending on the situation, might read as slightly pathetic, vaguely sinister or disarmingly sweet. (The actual Michael seems to have been a bit smoother, at least based on the obligatory snippet of archival footage placed over the end credits.) Though he’s no one’s idea of an obvious star, with his wrinkled threads and beat-up ride, he exudes an aw-shucks affability that persuades creator Bill Carruthers (David Strathairn) to cast him on the next day’s episode — in defiance of early red flags that Michael’s Midwestern guilelessness might itself be a front.
Then again, nothing else at CBS’ Television City is quite what it seems, either. When Michael arrives for his taping, PA Sylvia (Maisie Williams) walks the contestants past sets dressed to look like a jail or a Hong Kong alleyway. The effect is simultaneously magical and a little disorienting, as if she might be shepherding them into a fantasy realm. By the time they arrive at their destination, the Press Your Luck set seems simultaneously of the world but apart from it. It’s not that reality doesn’t count here, so much as it is filtered through layers of artificiality and bent around its own arcane rules.
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At first, Michael’s appearance seems about what you’d expect. He whiffs a few trivia questions, bumbles through small talk with his fellow players, loses a chunk of change in an early spin. Then he hits a hot streak that, over the hours, goes from exciting to improbable to clearly impossible. In the control room, Bill and his producers go from delighted to furious to terrified, fretting that his ballooning prize could bankrupt their entire production. The audience feels rather differently. To them, Michael is not just an extraordinarily fortunate fellow or a sneakily manipulative one. He becomes, as one producer observes, “the little guy who comes and takes down the man.”
The Luckiest Man in America ’s long list of executive producers includes Maria director Pablo Larraín, and one can sense his influence in the way it trades the usual biopic clichés for a dreamier, more subjective experience. As designed by Lulú Salgado, the Press Your Luck set is a claustrophobic maze of tight corridors, blinding lights and false fronts. Sound design by Andrés Velásquez periodically distorts the hum of electronics or the chatter of a crowd into a low rumble, as if some creature might be approaching from the bowels of the earth. Now and then, a devil-red mascot named Whammy silently materializes in a corner, like a grim reaper in wait.
Though nothing that happens here is explicitly surreal, these artistic choices make the studio feel like a sort of purgatory. As Michael racks up a record-breaking purse, he’s faced with an accounting of sorts. Fearing for their own jobs, staff members break into his truck for clues about his real history or real motives. They dredge up old enemies and bitter memories in attempts to throw his confidence, or dangle promises of fame and fortune to manipulate him. Michael’s weaknesses are put on display, like his arrogance and casual disregard for the rules. So are his strengths, like the ingenuity that enabled him to see through the mechanics of the game in a way that no one else has before. Hauser throws himself into every nuance of Michael’s roiling emotional states, from self-satisfied delight to debilitating anxiety.
Back in that talk show chair, Michael confides that the true reason he’s come on Press Your Luck is to reconnect with his estranged wife (Haley Bennett) and daughter: “All I want is to have breakfast with my family, but the only way I can is if I’m on their TV set.” Being seen over the airwaves, however, isn’t the same thing as making a genuine emotional connection. The Luckiest Man in America ultimately declines to pass judgment on Michael, offering neither straightforward uplift nor stern moralizing. We are, instead, left to draw our own conclusions. But in its stylish ambiguity, the film leaves too little for us to really chew on. The moment Michael isn’t on our screen anymore, he might as well cease to exist.
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