Lucky

Jeffrey Blitz made one of the most entertaining films of the century with the spelling bee documentary Spellbound, and while his latest effort Lucky boasts lower stakes and less drama, it has the same easygoing charm and sly observational wit. Lucky explores our nationwide obsession with the lottery by following the divergent fortunes of past jackpot winners and “unlucky” lotto addicts. Some of the Lucky lottery winners were saved by their good fortune (literally, in the case of a suicidal Illinois man), some were destroyed by it (“it’s like throwing Miracle-Gro on your worst personality traits,” says the friend of one bankrupt ex-winner), but all were irreparably displaced from their old lives. Blitz’s documentary works better as a series of character vignettes than as a serious meditation on blind optimism and the vagaries of fortune, but the characters are interesting and diverse enough to make it work.