There’s a film about a scandal involving someone possibly cheating at a game show, in which the movie is produced about 40 years after the events in question, and exacting period detail is a major part of the effort of making that movie. This description applies to Robert Redford’s 1994 Quiz Show, about the scandal on the game show Twenty-One, in the 1950s. And it also applies to the new The Luckiest Man in America, which is about the 1984 scandal in which a man was found to have cheated on the game show Press Your Luck.
The Luckiest Man in America, directed by Colombian filmmaker Samir Oliveros, isn’t nearly as good as Quiz Show, which was one of the best movies of the 1990s. It isn’t aiming as high, the story it’s telling isn’t as compelling, and it doesn’t have a plausible claim that it says anything profound about American history or culture. One takeaway is that Press Your Luck is kind of a stupid premise for a game show. However, the film, on its own merits, is fine. The period detail is meticulous, and the show looks like a decent approximation of a TV game show in 1984, both onscreen and off.
Paul Walter Hauser plays another in his endless series of sad sacks, many of them fact-based, as he also played Richard Jewell and Shawn Eckhardt, although his character this time has never been accused of murder or maiming. He plays Michael Larson, an Ohio ice cream man who talked his way onto the game show Press Your Luck and won a record amount of money. And because success on that particular game show depends on pressing the button at the exact right time, Larson was able to time the lights to effectively beat the game.
It wasn’t a high-level ongoing conspiracy like the Twenty-One scandal; the way the film tells it, the entire scheme got exposed within a single TV taping, even if it was long one. There’s also an argument that what Larson did was more akin to counting cards in a casino or sign-stealing in baseball—more outsmarting the game than outright cheating. And the producers and network suits (led by David Strathairn’s Bill Carruthers) weren’t innocent, and even toyed with doing what the evil executives did in Quiz Show.
The film, also the subject of a couple of documentaries, is told more or less in real-time, with characters both on and off-camera during a TV production, in a way that recalls both last year’s Late Night With the Devil and September 5.
Walton Goggins, currently lighting it up on two different Sunday night HBO shows, plays something closer to a straight man as game show host Peter Tomarken, although I prefer Goggins’ other recent game show turn on The Righteous Gemstones. However, the supporting cast features a lot of talented performers (Patti Harrison, Maisie Williams, James Wolk, and Shamier Anderson) who aren’t given much to do.