The supernatural comedy ‘Good Fortune’ is wildly surprising

Gabriel, it turns out, is the angel of rescuing people from texting and driving, invisibly tapping them on their shoulders so they look up just in time to avoid collisions. His stature in the angelic hierarchy means his wings are much smaller than those of his counterparts, like his manager Martha (Sandra Oh), or the kindly Azrael (Stephen McKinley Henderson), who shepherds lost souls to self-actualization. He asks for more responsibility at their weekly rooftop meetings, but is never given the chance.

Upon observing Arj’s daily routine, during which he’s spread thin by the cruelty of the gig economy, Gabriel decides to take him on as a pet project. In the process, he ignores one of his other “clients”—the sweet, funny hardware store worker and union organizer Elena (Keke Palmer)—with whom Arj happens to be smitten. Long before the movie’s magical switcheroo, in the vein of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, the film establishes a surprisingly explicit political purview, with Arj refusing to join Elena’s union efforts because he’s too wrung out by the daily grind, and too selfish to look outside himself.

This subplot of solidarity is, however, something Gabriel can’t even fathom or acknowledge as a path to fixing things, given his outmoded understanding of the world. The angels essentially function as the gods of The Good Place, i.e. stand-ins for vaguely progressive institutions like the Democratic Party, who are seldom willing to challenge the systems at fault. Gabriel is well-meaning, but lacks both the power and lived experience to make a meaningful impact. In his mind, having Arj temporarily swap places with his tech bro boss ought to be enough to give the failed filmmaker a new lease on life, but the world is more complicated than the moral binary Gabriel is shouldered to enforce.

Thanks to one of the many “task” apps Arj uses to find work, he ends up as Jeff’s assistant for a week. The two hit it off incredibly well, and the movie begins to take more coherent shape, even though Gabriel’s woes still feel like a separate story unfolding at a distance. However, the movie’s disparate parts finally click into place when the two plots finally collide. Arj, in an effort to impress Elena, pays for their date with Jeff’s company credit card, which leads to him being fired and sets off a more turbulent economic spiral. Seeing the floor fall out from under him, Gabriel decides to make himself known and seen to Arj, and tries to fill him with hope by showing him the life he’s destined to live—an act that proves an utter and hilarious failure. Arj’s position is so financially precarious that even these best case scenarios seem pitiful at best. So, with his other options exhausted, Gabriel opts for the nuclear option, leading to a Christmas Carol-like detour where the lesson doesn’t actually stick.

Then again, why would it? Jeff is left to tough it out on the streets for once, while Arj suddenly has ridiculous riches at his disposal. To make matters more complicated, this spell can’t be undone unless Arj decides to go back to the way things were, and until this deviation from reality is undone, Gabriel is even excommunicated from heaven and demoted to human form, where he’s forced to find a job of his own while toughing it out alongside Jeff.

Eliding the simplest and most obvious lesson, of a rich man changing through his experience with poverty (and vice versa), Good Fortune ends up with a slightly more complex drama rooted in the trio’s dynamics and relationships. Gabriel, now a naïve human learning the way things work for the first time, from his measly paycheck to the delights of drinking milkshakes and going dancing, ends up the movie’s heart and soul—Ansari knows exactly how to play on Reeve’s kindly, ethereal image—while Jeff and Arj are more concerned with screwing each other over, even as they learn more about each other’s lives.

All the while, even though Arj tries to get close to Elena in this reality too, the problems she faces at work don’t magically disappear, and only strengthen her efforts to unionize. That a mainstream Hollywood movie features scenes of Elena convincing her fellow workers to join the cause, and moments of them sharing food together as they draw up plans—as though these moments had been plucked from Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s Amazon labor documentary Union—is perhaps Hollywood’s most shocking recent development alongside Andor and One Battle After Another, in which progressive politics are given unapologetically revolutionary form.

 In all these cases including Good Fortune, art alone is unlikely to spark change, just like Gabriel’s interference is unlikely to alter the world’s fabric. But that these left-leaning ideas are so out in the open—even under corporate umbrellas like Lionsgate, Disney and Warner Bros.—represents a cathartic sea change. There’s an imaginary, alternate version of Good Fortune that the movie sometimes threatens to become, wherein simple morals and the efforts of a reformed, benevolent billionaire are enough of a band-aid to satiate the characters, as well as the audience. However, the film mines its situational humor from realities to which more and more viewers have become aware, about how capitalism ensures that those on the top rungs of the ladder continue to thrive by keeping others at the bottom. It’s a system that inherently corrodes people—Arj, when placed atop it, only helps his friends—and the major lesson that Jeff learns by the end of it is that only remaining options are radical change from within, or total societal revolt.

A film with politics this overt and preachy ought not to work as well as it does. However, Good Fortune uses its economic framework to build meaningful moments of character, and lures out its humor through a more intimate understanding of the way the world works, and the forces controlling it from just behind the curtain, by having two people on either side of its conundrum collide at lightspeed. Meanwhile, the presence of Reeves as an earnest cosmic being who learns the follies of modern human civilization firsthand is the kind of sweetly funny addition that makes the medicine go down slightly easier. Hollywood movies seldom feel like this, and while its story wraps up a little too neatly and conveniently, Good Fortune is an appropriately good time at the movies.