Lucky (2017)

Lucky (Harry Dean Stanton) lives alone in a house in the American Southwest. He's got a routine - morning exercise, milk, coffee, crossword at the diner, buy milk and smokes at the corner bodega, home to watch his game shows in the afternoon, evenings at a local bar. A lot of people know him to say "hello", but it's hard to say how well any of them know him.

One morning, he falls. Just out of the blue. Doctors can't find anything physically wrong, except he's real old. Eventually, bodies break down. At first, Lucky doesn't really do anything different. Goes to the diner, goes to the store (although he buys 3 packs of smokes, but maybe that is normal), goes to the bar. His friends seem more concerned than him, but gradually Lucky branches out a bit. He pauses in his walk one day to visit a pet store, and buys the box of crickets people feed to their pet reptiles to set them free. He attends a birthday party for the son of the lady who runs the bodega, and even leads the band in some sort of song. The waitress at the diner stops by, and they sit and watch Liberace play while smoking weed.

It's about coming to some kind of peace with mortality, and the different ways people do that. Lucky's friend (played by David Lynch) is meeting with an attorney to make sure his estate will be used to care for his pet tortoise, President Roosevelt, who escaped early in the movie. Lucky tries picking a fight with the attorney (played by Ron Livingston), but sees him later at the diner and they have a conversation where the attorney discusses a time he was nearly hit by a bus on the way to pick up his daughter. That prompted him to set everything up for what happens when he dies. Lucky points out it won't do anything for the lawyer, but I think it does. Now he knows his family won't have to deal with any of it when the day comes. That worry isn't hanging over his head, so he can focus on being with his loved ones.

Stanton plays Lucky as taciturn, rarely more than a few words at a time. The camera alternates between watching his face from a distance you might hold a conversation at, and longer shots. The latter are usually when he's going about his rounds, walking down the sidewalk with a heavy, flat-footed step. It's a peculiar stride, by I'm assuming it's a way Lucky ensures he's got a firm base with each step. Either way, it's a unique gait.

The most he speaks is a brief scene when an old Marine (Tom Skerritt) stops in the diner one day, and the two compare war experiences (because Lucky was in the Navy.) Even there, Skerritt talks more, but Lucky puts a few consecutive sentences together. There are lots of things about him we don't learn. He calls someone on the phone at night, but we only hear Lucky's side of the conversations, and never learn who he's calling. The waitress asks about a photo, but Lucky only says they aren't his kids, not whose they are. His version of acceptance seems to involve setting aside pointless grudges and embracing the occasional opportunity to branch out, but otherwise, keep going as he has for some period of time. Alone isn't lonely, as he tells his doctor.