Movie review - Good Fortune 2025

Good Fortune (2025) works pretty well as a mainstream Hollywood comedy; it is a fairly typical "3 Star" movie (i.e. 3/5 Stars; i.e. worth watching, but not re-watching). 

What makes Good Fortune rather different is that it is very earnest in tone, and tackles the deep subject of "meaning in life"; and, as such I found its assumptions and aspirations interesting and illustrative, and I continued thinking about it for a while after watching. 

I was attracted to the movie because it features an angel as a main character (and I find it interesting to see how this device is used); but the conceptualization of angel is - as usual - a being that "helps people" in very practical ways (almost trivial ways, in the case of our protagonist) in a universe assumed to be wholly materialistic in its nature. 

But the angel comes-up-against a person - endearingly played by the film's auteur Aziz Ansari - whose constantly-working life is on a down-trend of materially deprivation and insecurity, such that it seems to him not worth living. 

The other main character is an ultra-wealthy technology-investor-type of the post 1990s style; whose life is depicted as very pleasant and easy - and a lot happier. 

Magical-life-swaps ensue; and these are used to examine the question of what Makes Life Worth Living, in order to save the "soul" of the despairing protagonist, and undo a plot conundrum. 

These "things" that MLWL, are all depicted material, except for romantic relationships. For instance, much is made of the Mexican food Tacos, as a symbol of the good life; and a cheap kind of good life... that could/should be accessible to all. 

Because the life worth living is material, the "answer" to the problem is a material one; and that arrived-at is (implicitly) mid-twentieth-century, Old Left, style socialism. 

So Trades Unions are very positive depicted as a way "forward", and redistribution of wealth from the few ultra-rich to the hundred-millions of grindingly poor; is explicitly stated to be the solution to poverty. 

This is portrayed as if it were a "radical" notion, but in reality the ideal utopia is almost exactly a reactionary yearning for the 1950s in The West. Something that already has-been, and which was so vehemently rejected at the time by the exact same class of people who are making this movie!

In other words, Good Fortune implicitly rejects the New Left focus on race, feminism and the sexual revolution; and argues for a restoration of the Old Left focus on socialist economics.  

Except, of course, it doesn't! The movie has the usual (mandatory) quota-casting and idealization of "vibrancy" and the rest of it. So what is actually being advocated is to re-impose Old Left economics on top of the actually-existing New Left society. 

Therefore; the movie says nothing-at-all about the decades of colossal immigration which was exactly the primary cause of the (rightly) vilified mass life of a "gig-economy" of low-paid, insecure jobs getting worse at one end; and a tiny minority of ever-fewer, ever-richer and ever more-powerful people at the top.  

Because it is an historical fact that it was the Old Left who favoured a Trades-Union-dominated, high-minimum wage economy; with strong top-down regulation of work conditions and secure contracts - that were the group most vehemently against mass immigration - and for very obvious reasons (i.e. "obvious" to common sense, if not to the current ruling intellectual class!). 

But my main point is that this morally-earnest movie can come-up with no higher ideal for human existence; than reversion to the actually-achieved socialist Old Left, mid-20th century, notion of a decent minimum level of material provision and security for the masses, in context of a structurally-secular vision of reality.

Yet even this mundane, low-animal-level, "barnyard ethics" social-utopia of "comfort and convenience for all"; is rendered an impossible "fairytale" - by the insistence on the continuing destructive reality of open-ended massive immigration with its inevitable consequences!

 

It is the old story. Those who ask for, work for, live for, aspire to have "nothing more" than a comfortable life of minimal decency; will thereby become so alienated, fearful, demotivated, and despairing that they will have even so meagre an existence taken from them. 

Materialism is incoherent - and leads to incoherent understand. 

Because human beings Just Are by nature religious and spiritual by their nature; we are creatures who can only function in a (broadly) sensible and realistic way, when we know that this mortal life is not everything...

Subtract all this; and what remains is not just happy or miserable) animals, but something less-than an animal.