THE LUCKY ONES sss Directed by Neil BURGER Written by BURGER AND DIRK WITTENBORN With RACHEL MCADAMS, TIM ROBBINS, AND MICHAEL PEÑA
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Thirty years later, after the Vietnam war had bitterly divided the country, Hollywood began to address the veterans who’d come home from southeast Asia, and when the 1979 Oscars rolled around, two of the most heavily nominated movies were Hal Ashby’s Coming Home and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter. As Peter Biskind detailed in a recent Vanity Fair story, these two films polarized the academy just as the war had polarized the nation: Coming Home, the story of a woman who falls in love with a paraplegic veteran, was championed by more liberal voters, while The Deer Hunter, about three Pennsylvania steel workers traumatized by their combat experience, won over the more conservative voters. Neither was a commercial smash along the lines of The Best Years of Our Lives, but both were solid successes with the public, and on Oscar night the major prizes were divided between them—Coming Home took best actor, actress, and screenplay; The Deer Hunter best picture, director, and supporting actor.
Whether Neil Burger’s The Lucky Ones will break the jinx is anyone’s guess, but as a story it’s more convincing and substantial than Stop-Loss or Home of the Brave. Inevitably, it’s about three soldiers—middle-aged family man Cheaver (Tim Robbins), volatile TK (Michael Peña), and dumb but genial Colee (Rachel McAdams)—who arrive stateside without quite returning home. But Burger, who wrote and directed the canny Interview With the Assassin and The Illusionist, doesn’t use The Best Years of Our Lives as a template. He was more inspired by Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail (1973), in which two sailors are ordered to transport a third to the naval prison at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to serve an eight-year sentence. Like that film, The Lucky Ones is structured as a picaresque. As a series of complications takes the trio from New York to Saint Louis to Salt Lake City to Las Vegas, the trauma of war is never far from the surface, but the movie has a healthy sense of humor that lets Burger examine their emotional isolation without sinking into a bog of despair.
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