A clip of the real “Press Your Luck” episode from 1984 that inspired “The Luckiest Man in America” accompanies the end credits, taken from the mid-show banter between contestant Michael Larson and Peter Tomarken. Larson has the kind of anecdotes that probably made a producer smile during a pre-interview, telling Tomarken about how he tried to make good with his daughter after missing her birthday and drove an ice cream truck the previous summer to supplement his income as an air conditioning repairman. It’s good enough to fill 45 seconds of air time, but it’s hard to see what director Samir Oliveros did in making it the backbone of a 90-minute film covering Larson’s infamous appearance on the game show.
If Larson is remembered now, it’s for the fact that he won $110,000 on the show by memorizing the algorithm of the game’s Big Board to maximize his prize potential, and Oliveros is admirably more intrigued by why he did it than how. Yet “The Luckiest Man in America” is designed more to answer the former question, constrained by a real-time format to track the day of the taping when Larson threatened to break the bank. The approach should work when the show’s producers scramble to figure out how this cornpone contestant out Lebanon, Ohio, has outsmarted them. But even when they start digging up dirt, Oliveros and co-writer Maggie Briggs can’t easily incorporate the more interesting elements of Larson’s life, from his preparation for the game or the fallout from the appearance, while stuck on the set of “Press Your Luck.”
Larson may have worked out a sound strategy for the game, but “The Luckiest Man in America” often has fuzzy math. With the dependably endearing Paul Walter Hauser as Larson, it’s forgivable that “Press Your Luck” producer Bill Cunningham (David Straithairn) is won over by his “aw shucks” attitude even with the knowledge that Larson snuck into their casting call by claiming a different contestant’s spot. Instead of getting arrested, as Bill’s colleague Chuck (Shamier Anderson) has arranged, Larson gets a callback for the show, driving his ice cream truck onto the lot of Television City in Los Angeles.
Hints of the more interesting and fun film “The Luckiest Man in America” could be pop up throughout when the producers end up being put on the spot instead of the contestant. Having Walton Goggins around as Tomarken, Haley Bennett as Larson’s wife Patricia, Maisie Williams as a studio tour guide and Patti Harrison and Brian Geraghty as his fellow contestants suggests this worked well enough on the page to attract such a strong ensemble, but less so in its ultimate execution, despite their best efforts. Any mystery behind Larson being a questionable character is erased almost immediately, even as the film strains to reveal the man’s personal life and concerns, going so far as to have him wander onto a talk show on the lot where its host (Johnny Knoxville) thinks nothing of spontaneously offering up the couch for Larson to pour his heart out.
“The Luckiest Man in America” doesn’t diminish the promise that Oliveros displayed in his debut feature “Bad Lucky Goat” when everything about the film looks right for the film’s seriocomic tone. Cinematographer Pablo Lozano seizes on the dimmer lighting of old-fashioned bulbs in a pre-computerized era of game shows to instill a darkness to the proceedings, while production designer Lulú Salgado’s impressive re-creation of the “Press Your Luck” set and surrounding studio lot is made to feel simultaneously exciting and foreboding.
However, when Larson plays the game knowing what the end result will be, a sense of detachment sets in for an audience. The same happens when the film takes as many shortcuts to get to its conclusion, defying logic in the control room, where no one thinks of simply shutting down the show as soon as they believe they have a cheater on their hands. Even after announcing with a prominent disclaimer that what you’re watching is a dramatization, the film is accurate in at least one respect: In spite of the money Larson accumulates, he never feels like a winner. With such a wealth of talent at its disposal, “The Luckiest Man in America” is strangely never as satisfying as it should be.
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