Sitting through the 88 minutes of this fine movie is a bitter-sweet experience. Lucky quickly captures your sympathy and interest. A ninety-year-old heavy smoker, his world has been reduced to an unchanging daily routine: yoga, coffee and crossword at the diner, buying milk and cigarettes at the convenience store, TV shows back home, and tomato juice at the bar at night. The proximity and inevitability of his death press upon him, and there is no escaping the hopelessness of his atheism. It pains one to see such a lovable character surrendering to a view of life as meaningless and death as nothingness.
Stanton's first significant role was in Cool Hand Luke, Paul Newman's death and resurrection themed story set in the horrors of Alabama's prison system. Stanton's character sang the haunting gospel song "Just a Closer Walk With Thee" in a central scene of the movie. Its message of faith and hope stands in stark contrast to the gospel of nihilism that Harry preaches to all he meets:
When my feeble life is o'er,
Time for me will be no more,
Guide me gently, safely o'er
To Thy kingdom's shore, to Thy shore.
But maybe all is not lost for Lucky. In a touching scene as he shares a joint with a kindly social worker, he confesses "I am scared." Then in a bar argument with a friend whose tortoise has gone walkabout, he is pulled up short by his friend's passionate retort "There are some things in this life
that are bigger than all of us, and a tortoise is one of them!" At the end, Lucky ponders a large old cactus, scarred by long life -- but surrounded by healthy young bushes springing up from the roots of the past. And the tortoise slowly creeps across the desert landscape as Lucky walks away into the future. Not sure what to make of all the symbolism there, but one can only hope that at the end for Lucky and others like him, hope and faith break through.
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