☆☆☆½
The easiest and most obvious movie to which to compare Aziz Ansari's Good Fortune is Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, but the comparisons might be a little too obvious — an angel is sent to Earth to help straighten out the life of a down-on-his-luck Everyman who has lost his way.
Yet the two movies I kept thinking most about while watching Good Fortune were two other films written and directed by actors: Warren Beatty's Heaven Can Wait (co-written with Elaine May and co-directed with Buck Henry) and Albert Brooks's Defending Your Life. You sort of have to wonder what it is about actors that makes them think this deeply about heaven, angels and the precious, unappreciated nature of life.
While Brooks and Beatty were primarily concerned with the afterlife, Good Fortune is most decidedly about this life, but Ansari's film shares the whimsical, sardonic, kind-heartedness of those earlier movies while mostly eschewing Capra corn.
So, here's the kicker: While I didn't like it quite as much as Heaven Can Wait or Defending Your Life, I liked Good Fortune quite a bit more than the quintessential American Christmastime classic, largely because of the astonishingly perfect casting of Keanu Reeves as the angel who has to set things right.
Reeves is Gabriel, an angel's name if ever there was one, but as far as angels go he's pretty low on the pecking order. Every angel, it turns out, specializes in one particular area of life that can go wrong — airplane accidents, for instance, or choking. Gabriel's focus is texting and driving. Turns out, humans really like to do that.
Higher angels have higher causes, and Gabriel can't hide his jealousy for Azrael (Stephen McKinley Henderson), who guides people who have lost hope. Chief Angel Martha (Sandra Oh) empathizes with Gabriel's frustration, but her understanding only goes so far. When Gabriel stumbles across hapless gig worker Arj (Ansari), who is at the end of his rope after being fired by tech bro Jeff (Seth Rogen), he intervenes.
Up to this point, Good Fortune isn't far different from Capra or Beatty, but when Martha tells Gabriel she has no choice but to take his wings away and force him to live among humans, Reeves steps to the fore and takes control of the movie. The film's main plot should be about the way Arj and Jeff's lives get reversed, and how once-destitute Arj becomes wealthy beyond all measure while Jeff — who swears he came from "nothing" (his parents didn't give him money, that was his grandfather, after all) — struggles to make ends meet in a dead-end, gig-economy life.
Grappling with his newfound wealth, Arj assumes money will be an aphrodisiac for his former co-worker Elena — but as brought to life by Keke Palmer, she's an idealistic, passionate and grounded woman who sees an opportunity to take a short cut, but refuses it. She doesn't know what's happening with Arj and Jeff, but she sees right through the wealth and sheen and rejects a life that rewards the easy and the effortless.
If the movie had stopped there — if Palmer's role had been like Julie Christie's in Heaven Can Wait or Meryl Streep's in Defending Your Life (and Palmer shines as brightly as either of them) — Good Fortune could have been something special, especially with Reeves as the befuddled angel who struggles (al-)mightily with his fate.
But Ansari makes a last-minute swing for the fences by tacking on a "message" to his movie. Given that this is a movie about heaven and angels and the afterlife, it's fortunately not a religious message — but it's heavy-handed nonetheless, and the movie loses momentum at a crucial moment. The fumble means Good Fortune won't be as perpetual a classic as Capra, Beatty or Brooks, though I wouldn't be surprised if, after it spends a few years on streaming, Ansari's film becomes something of a favorite, thanks in large part to the affable, delightful and disarming presence of Reeves. Watching a fallen angel roam the Earth has never been as adorable.
Viewed November 2, 2025 — AMC Burbank 6
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