When Harry Dean Stanton, cinema’s perennial drifter, finally drifted off this earth in 2017, aged ninety one, there were few eulogies, no mariachi bands lamenting his passing, and not many column inches. In death it seemed he was still Hollywood’s outsider, tagged with the reductive label “character actor” .
With his craggy, lean face and big, dark, wounded puppy eyes,he seemed to melt into the roles, inhabit them with a soulful intensity few ever achieve. He remained outside the system, hating interviews and yet appearing in films by some of the greatest directors. Even in supporting roles, he was often the best part of a film. You couldn’t take your eyes off him, he was so magnetic.Repo Man, Pretty In Pink, Alien, Cool Hand Luke… Not films you’d put together by genre. But he nailed it, every time.
This is why I love his penultimate performance as the titular Lucky. Directed by John Carroll Lynch,with a screenplay by Logan Sparks and Drago Sumonja, it’s an amble along the pathway to mortality. What could have been mawkish or morbid is in fact, beautiful, pithy and wise. Stanton is a bit of a rascal, as Dylan Thomas put it, “railing against the dying of the light”. He has no fucks left to give, and little time.
With co-stars such as David Lynch, Veronica Huff, Ed Begley Jr and Tom Skerritt, it’s defiantly low-key but.no less affecting. There’s not so much a plot as a fading Polaroid of a man who knows he’s on borrowed time after a rare fall in his house. But rather than have a predictable epiphany, he continues to live what’s left of his life in his own way. It could be the older companion to his other masterpiece Paris, Texas, but there’s the sense that romantic relationships are anathema to Lucky, whereas Travis let his past love consume him.
We are so gifted to have these wonderful, wise portraits created by Stanton to come back to again and again: “just lucky, I guess’, to quote Paris, Texas’ Hunter.
Photo stills: Magnolia Pictures.
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