Directed by Samir Oliveros | Written by Oliveros, Maggie Briggs, and Amanda Freedman | 91 min | ▲▲1/2
Loosely inspired by actual events, here’s a story about the insincerity of American media and how someone found a way to game it. Is that the American dream? Go a little deeper it’s about an average man who messed up his life and marriage who thinks a get-rich-quick-scheme will reconnect him with his daughter.
Michael Larson (Paul Walter Hauser) is introduced as a small-time con artist with a plan. He elbows his way onto a game show, called Press Your Luck, as a guest in May, 1984. We meet a lot of other characters in a restricted studio lot where almost the entire film takes place — echoing Anna Kendrick’s recent Woman Of The Hour in aesthetics, if not theme. This picture actually has more in common with another movie, Robert Redford’s Oscar-nominated Quiz Show starring Ralph Fiennes, though that one was set in the 1950s and was more concerned with class and privilege in the United States, and a certain kind of lost innocence.
On this TV set, almost everyone’s a bit compromised, including the producer, Bill Carruthers (David Strathairn), and host, Peter Tomarken (Walton Goggins), comfortable and greasy, contemptuous of the guests and quick to affix blame. Further down the ladder, Chuck (Shamier Anderson) and Sylvia (Maisie Williams) are witnesses, desperate to hold onto their jobs and not receive that blame. Disappointingly, the talented Patti Harrison barely manifests as a fellow guest, and neither does Haley Bennett as Michael’s wife, Patricia.
Hauser, however, is magnetic and mysterious — he carries the movie. His Michael isn’t especially confident, even in his own plan, but he is driven. The mystery of how he manages to win on this show is good fun to piece together, and the editing, and a tricky, era-sounding-specific score from John Carroll Kirby helps keep things jumping. Taken as a whole, the filmmakers decision to keep us at arms length — the actors don’t get a lot of close-ups — definitely plays into the film’s uneven emotional journey, along with a conclusion that edges on the anticlimactic. You end up wishing for more luck than you get.
