LOGAN LUCKY, the new film from Steven Soderbergh, is a delicious surprise. It’s about working-class Southerners robbing the Charlotte Motor Speedway during a NASCAR race, and its weaving of the intricacies of planning, executing, and living in the post-heist glow is hilarious and even warm.
More than that, it’s a heist film in which ordinary people (not slick, hypermasculine Armani warriors) employ imagination instead of heavy artillery to take money from an institution that doesn’t need it anyway. The fact that the target of the theft got the money through selling overpriced, undernourishing food and drink is only one piece of bonus philosophical content. It’s a rare thing: a thoroughly entertaining movie with real things to say about the moment it is released. At a time when left-right political division in the U.S. has intensified, Soderbergh, a Southerner who works from New York, has made a red-blue reconciliation comedy.
Some critics have challenged Logan Lucky for dealing in what they perceive as stereotypes, but Soderbergh himself has reminded journalists that comedy relies on stereotypes. What matters is who the joke is on. In Logan Lucky, it’s the powerful who are gently mocked (a prison warden who lets prisoners suffer rather than admit imperfections in his system, corporate chiefs who fear liability rules more than they care about their employees). The central characters are of categories usually scorned or sidelined in mainstream popular culture: an underemployed West Virginia laborer (Channing Tatum), a sassy hairdresser (Riley Keough), and an Iraq vet (Adam Driver) who lost part of an arm in the line of duty but is portrayed neither as pitiable nor aggressive. The water is tainted, the man isn’t hiring, and people are trying to get by, not biting off more than they can chew.
Logan Lucky is about people at the margins seeking their share, no more, with sanity and warmth (even making amends to people they exploited on the way). Its illustration of heartland community culture is subtle: When the national anthem is sung at the start of a race and military jets fly overhead, it’s not a triumphal or bellicose image, and it’s not played for laughs: It just is, a part of America in which some folks feel at home, from which some are alienated, about which some others feel judgmental. But it’s real, and it’s likely that audiences will be divided between those who feel recognized here and those who feel distant. Look closely and you might see garishness transforming into something more humane and a playful story about, to paraphrase one character, people doing “what they say they’re going to do.”
Gareth Higgins is an Irish writer and storyteller based in North Carolina. He is the founder of www.moviesandmeaning.com, and you can also find him at www.garethhiggins.net.
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