Much has happened since Jeffrey Blitz' SPELLBOUND was inexplicably (and famously) rejected from Sundance eight years ago and went on to be a Oscar nominated docu-smash that heralded the arrival of theatrical viability for nonfiction (even if on a small scale). For Blitz, that's included a narrative film (ROCKET SCIENCE) that did play Sundance and an Emmy for directing on the American adaptation of The Office. For documentary it's been a nearly endless (but surely receding) string of competition films that learned all the wrong lessons from his genre-breaking debut.
Now Blitz is back to the nonfiction feature world that birthed him with LUCKY, a look at lottery winners, that's screening in Sundance's American documentary competition. The problem with having made an out-of-the-box smash that (game) changed the face of nonfiction? The dreaded (perceived) sophomore slump.
Eric Kohn, writing for The Wrap, gets it out of the way up front, stating that LUCKY comes "nowhere near the crowd-pleasing capacity" of SPELLBOUND, but is still an "amusing, feature-length essay":
"Essentially composed of mini-profiles featuring overnight millionaires and their changed lives, Blitz's movie shows how the unexpected win often gives rise to philosophical perspectives. A couple that won $110 million emphasize the importance of not spoiling their children, while an older man previously seen as a hermit sort refuses to abandon his comfortably sloppy lifestyle."
Bilge Ebiri writing for the IFC's Independent Eye blog found himself charmed by the effort:
"Jeffrey Blitz walks a deceptively fine line in LUCKY a film that looks at the effects of winning the lottery on a variety of individuals and families. It would be easy - too easy -- to screw this up. The lottery, with its false hope and promise of randomly granted affluence, makes an ideal bête noire for any filmmaker or artist extolling the value of hard work and the evils of capitalism; the temptation is probably too great to just show us the oft-repeated fact that a large percentage of these winners wind up losing all their money...
Luckily, Blitz isn't too interested in preaching to us. He employs the same cross-sectional approach he employed in "Spellbound," following people from all walks of life whose lives were changed by the lottery, but this time there's little common purpose. They've all won already. What fascinates the filmmaker are the divergent paths they took after their victories."
The A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin writes that Blitz makes "nice movies about nice people for nice people":
"LUCKY sacrifices depth for breadth; Blitz might have been better off focusing on few subject instead of casting his net far and wide and chronicling such tangentially related figures as a woman who spends a small fortune playing the lottery everyday and a young man whose asshole friends tricked him into thinking he’d won the lottery using a prank they stole from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Blitz’s amiable time-waster is breezy to a fault. I found it engaging, but I don’t expect it to linger in my psyche for very long."
Rabin gives the film a B-.
Meanwhile, the New York Post's Kyle Smith also draws the comparison to Blitz' previous effort:
"The degree of difficulty involved in making the film may have been substantial; if you were sitting on $110 million, you might become a little press-shy. And LUCKY is well-crafted, with surprising and funny scenes throughout. But it doesn't really rise to the level of a theatrical release, basically consisting of talking-heads interviews, droll animated sequences explaining fun trivia about lotteries, and B-roll with winners showing us around their homes or the convenience stores where they bought the tickets."
HitFix' Daniel Feinberg was also looking for a little bit more:
"The profiles are cute and occasionally slightly moving, but they're also superficial, as if Blitz is afraid of pushing too hard to ask people who much they're spending, how much they're giving to charity, how much they're giving to friends and loved ones. The camera just lets people congratulate themselves on new-found altruism, celebrate writing "huge checks," but no details are ever provided.
Blitz also has no interest in examining the lottery process, not even in the slightest. He barely examines the lottery's pervasiveness in lower economic areas and doesn't look at the perception (true or false) that the lottery preys on lower income people who can't afford to lose the money because they think it's a more realistic way to break through the American class system than hard work and general upward mobility. The film only features a single long-time lottery loser and it portrays her as being a lovable eccentric whose profligate gambling raises nary a discouraging word."
A similar thought crossed the mind of Cinematical's Scott Weinberg:
"Shot slick and cut cleanly, with nifty animated interstitials full of interesting jackpot stats, Lucky is a fun little documentary that shows the joys and the unexpected stresses of sudden mega-wealth, and it'd make a great companion piece to a documentary about the actual inner workings of our government's powerfully popular state-sponsored super-lotteries. Whether anyone would actually be allowed to make that documentary, I have no idea."
I can't get over the pejoratives: "talking head interviews", "slickly shot". Would they rather see out-of-focus camera work, all Dutch angles? And when you interview people, their speech does tend to come out of their mouths, thus talking and head.
I think the critics aren't happy unless the filmmaker is "ripping the mask" off someone.
Posted by: KateC | January 30, 2010 at 01:25 PM