`Lucky Numbers’ is a comedy about greed, lust, murder and stupidity; a classic American success story set in a classic American small city: Harrisburg, Pa. The movie, a comedy of bad manners with many punchy moments and many irritatingly glib ones, stars John Travolta as a narcissistic and somewhat clueless TV weatherman named Russ Richards. A smiley local celebrity with his own parking spot at the local Denny’s, Russ is so dangerously overextended he tries to rig the state lottery with his equally narcissistic and clueless girlfriend, Lotto Ball selector Crystal Latroy (Lisa Kudrow). “Lucky Numbers” is a chronicle of mischance, ofRuss’ rise and fall, his crime and punishment, his season in a comic hell.
As so often happens in the movies, crime doesn’t pay — or, at least it doesn’t pay in the ways the characters imagined. As directed by Nora Ephron and written by Adam Resnick (“Cabin Boy”), this is a dark comedy in the muckraking mode that starts out murderously well but then begins to unravel — just like Russ’ misbegotten schemes. By the climax, amusing cynicism has edged closer to conventional big studio keep-the-customer-smiling cynicism.
That’s a shame, because much of “Lucky Numbers” is as funny as Ephron (writer of “When Harry Met Sally,” director of “Sleepless in Seattle”) can be. It has her special urbane touch, her light, nervy sophistication, without the false romanticism she sometimes tacks on. The movie, at its best, suggests some of the acid TV satire of “To Die For,” some of the noir comedy of “Blood Simple.”
Russ is a good role for Travolta: the golden American fool, a good-looking, well-spoken guy — known for his bouncy weather reports — whose fondest dream is to become the next Bob Barker or Dick Clark, a star national TV game-show host. In the meantime, though, Russ has foundered in a disastrous venture: a snowmobile dealership stymied by Harrisburg’s unseasonal lack of snow. Faced with foreclosure, Russ turns to striptease club owner Gig (Tim Roth) for a quick loan. Instead, Gig suggests a simple crime: a phony robbery and insurance claim scam, with the help of Gig’s main muscle guy, Dale “the Thug” Wagstaff (Michael Rapaport), an irrepressible Pete Rose admirer with a Pete Rose bat.
Dale proves a fearless but dysfunctional and hot-tempered crook, and the robbery is foiled by the accidental presence of Russ’ hero-worshiping sales-guy Larry (Michael Weston). With gleeful speed, Ephron shows Russ sinking deeper, as Gig talks him into exploiting his relationship with Crystal (Kudrow) to fix the lottery and reap a multimillion-dollar jackpot. Crystal responds with amoral delight, enthusiastically joining in the plot and recruiting her seemingly straight-arrow cousin Walter (played by “Awful Truth” humorist Michael Moore) as ticket-casher.
John Huston, quoting his own great heist movie “The Asphalt Jungle,” liked to call crime “a left-handed form of human endeavor.” For Ephron it’s a tangle-footed, ham-handed form of endeavor, with each new scheme leading to worse screwups and more people accidentally or stupidly drawn in. One nasty surprise follows another until the ending: the nastiest surprise of all.
Harrisburg is the hometown of writer Resnick, and it was also the site of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor near-meltdown and of an actual attempt to fix the Pennsylvania lottery in 1980. Using both those events (the second one totally altered), Resnick shows how even disaster or a botched crime can make a community “special” — and how things then can spin further out of control. For Russ, a basically moral guy, crime is the result of stupidity and desperation. To Crystal, crime is just an exciting new career opportunity.
Travolta and Kudrow are both so adept at playing good-looking but slightly dopey people that it’s logical that they’d wind up making a comedy about second- or third-rate TV talent. Kudrow’s comic gifts are often dazzling; right now, she does the best ditzes in the business. But she’s also able to convey the moral blankness of someone like Crystal with an offhand skill that would be scary without the jokes.
Travolta, by contrast, puts some actual sweetness into Russ — not enough to make his crimes palatable but enough to let us follow him somewhat sympathetically through this morass of escalating idiocy and evil. There’s a mangled innocence at the core of his corruption, whereas Crystal only has double-reflecting mirrors around a heart of raspberry ice. Travolta doesn’t make Russ a dead-on comic turn — as Kudrow, Roth and Rapaport all do with their characters. But he holds the movie together and every once in a while, he has a magical acting moment, like his stupefied and guilty reaction (captured on a monitor) to his station’s news story about a murder.
Why did “Lucky Numbers” make me laugh but let me down? In the end, dark comedy needs a moral vision: a higher standard against which the pratfalls can be measured. This is an often barbed satire of TV, media and the great American Dream of “get rich quick,” but at bottom it’s still a standard Hollywood movie.
“Lucky Numbers,” like most noir comedies, touches upon serious issues — scathing views of today’s media and society, vitriolic portrayals of the way we live now. These issues are finally sidestepped but not completely. The American Dream in “Lucky Numbers” may be stripped open with refreshing irreverence, but it’s also a dream that these moviemakers would probably never thoroughly trash. After all, even though filmmaking itself can be a left-handed form of human endeavor, the whole industry makes its fortune peddling exactly those dreams. “Lucky Numbers” is a movie divided. The big prize is almost there, but, in the end, it slips away.
`LUCKY NUMBERS’
(star)(star) 1/2
Directed by Nora Ephron; written by Adam Resnick; photographed by John Lindley; edited by Barry Malkin; production designed by Dan Davis; music by George Fenton; produced by Andrew Lazar, Jonathan Krane, Sean Daniel, Ephron. A Paramount Pictures release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:48. MPAA rating: R (language, sexuality, some drug use and brief violence).
THE CAST
Russ Richards …………….. John Travolta
Crystal Latroy ……………. Lisa Kudrow
Gig ……………………… Tim Roth
Dale Wagstaff …………….. Michael Rapaport
Dick Simmons ……………… Ed O’Neill
Lt. Pat Lakewood ………….. Bill Pullman
