Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Tori Preston | Film | October 20, 2025
Can money buy happiness? We all know we should say “no” - that there is more to life than whatever luxuries money can afford, and that deep fulfillment comes from things money can’t buy, like our relationships with our loved ones. We also know that the world is hard, and so many of the stressors that do impact our happiness are financial. Maybe money doesn’t directly buy happiness, but it sure does solve a lot of the problems that get in the way of happiness.
Enter Good Fortune, Aziz Ansari’s comedic spin on the haves and the have-nots. Ansari wrote, directed, and stars in the film as Arj, an aspiring documentary editor who’s stuck making ends meet as a gig worker in Los Angeles. When he’s not stocking shelves part-time at don’t-call-it-Home Depot, he’s fetching take-out and performing odd jobs he gets off an app. At night, he sleeps in his car, and in the morning, he showers at a YMCA. He’s pretty miserable.
His chance to turn his life around comes when he impresses a venture capitalist tech bro named Jeff (Seth Rogen). He cleans Jeff’s garage, then convinces Jeff to hire him as an assistant. But one mistake soon costs him his job, and when his car is towed next, Arj hits rock bottom with no place to sleep and no way to earn money. It’s looking pretty bleak for poor Arj… and that’s when Gabriel steps in. A low-level guardian angel, Gabriel (Keanu Reeves) is normally in charge of saving lives from texting-while-driving mishaps, but after witnessing Arj’s struggles, he thinks he can do more. Can Gabriel save this lost soul and give him hope for his life?
The usual tactic — delivering visions of the future that awaits him — doesn’t cut it, because even in the future, money problems continue to hound Arj. So instead, Gabriel decides to show Arj that having money won’t make him happy either by pulling a Trading Places and swapping Arj and Jeff. Now Arj gets to live in the mansion with the sauna and the cold plunge, and Jeff is stuck sleeping in Arj’s crappy car next to Gabriel, who has lost his celestial job and his wings until he sorts this mess out. Except that the only way to fix it is for Arj to want to go back to his crappy old, overworked life — and he most certainly does not want to do that.
Good Fortunes is a clever enough spin on an obvious conceit, particularly when it delves into grueling and unfair struggles of the gig economy, and the cast elevates it to a level of charming that makes the ride worthwhile. Reeves, in particular, is a delight as Gabriel adjusts to living as a human (Chicken nuggies? Good! Sweating? Weird!) while everyone around him lusts after this clueless, sexy sexagenarian. If you’ve missed seeing Keanu in Bill and Ted doofus mode, this one’s for you. Rogen could play Jeff in his sleep, but he’s a great counterpoint to Ansari’s anxious energy as Arj. Rounding out the cast is Keke Palmer as Elena, Arj’s old co-worker at the hardware store and the love interest he could have, if he could figure his life out.
The problem is that a movie like this can only resolve itself by having Arj and Jeff swap back, and that’s the thing Ansari couldn’t figure out. I mean, it happens — is that a spoiler? It’s just how movies work — but Ansari couldn’t come up with a convincing reason for Arj to want his old life back. Arj doesn’t suddenly realize that being rich won’t solve his problems because it did, and the movie never offers any downsides to extreme wealth. Instead, Good Fortune clearly drives home the point that being poor is an almost impossible hole to climb out of! If there is a message to the movie, it isn’t that money doesn’t buy happiness — it’s that no matter how awesome being rich is, systems of extreme wealth always come at the expense and exploitation of the workers at the bottom.
It’s all a sort of blood money, which brings me to the biggest stumbling block Good Fortune faces right now: Ansari’s participation in the Riyadh Comedy Festival, and the backlash he’s faced during promotions for his movie. Taken at face value, Good Fortune is a fine movie. Not great, not terrible, but fun enough to watch at home when it hits streaming, I’d say. However, the context surrounding the movie is far more interesting. A lot was riding on Good Fortune for Ansari, and not just because it’s his debut feature film as a writer and director. It’s because this was his second attempt at making his debut. His previous film, Being Mortal, was shuttered during production when its star, Bill Murray, engaged in inappropriate behavior with a female assistant on set. Rogen and Palmer had actually been cast in that film, but Ansari had an early draft of Good Fortune up his sleeve and kept them on board for his next attempt.
Before that, Ansari himself faced allegations of sexual misconduct at the height of #MeToo. A woman he’d gone on a date with posted anonymously that she’d felt pressured to have sex with him, and he issued a statement saying he’d thought the encounter was consensual. In terms of responses, his was about as good as you could hope — he wasn’t defensive and he seemed to genuinely reflect on his actions. And though he wasn’t “cancelled,” he did fall off the radar a bit — wrapping up Master of None, performing stand-up, and working on his big feature film debut.
I wouldn’t call Good Fortune a comeback, necessarily, but it definitely represents a return to the spotlight for Ansari as a creator — and the last thing he needed right now was unnecessary controversy. Finding out that he was performing at Riyadh, and then seeing him try to justify it, then attempting to donate a portion of his payment to Human Rights Watch only to have it rejected, it just seemed like Ansari was stepping on one rake after another right when the conversation should have been about his new film. My impression changed, however, when I saw Good Fortune, because I think the reason Ansari accepted blood money to whitewash the crimes of the Saudi government is the same reason he couldn’t write a convincing resolution for Arj. It’s because he knows that being rich is pretty great, actually, and if all wealth comes from exploitation, does it really matter where the paycheck comes from?
Maybe a person who understands why it does, in fact, matter where the money comes from could have fixed the third act of Good Fortune and made it a great movie, but Aziz Ansari is not that person. Instead, we have a man and a movie that make gestures at seeing the bigger picture, but still can’t turn down the easy life.
