Producer: Amanda Freedman  Director: Samir Oliveros   Screenplay: Maggie Briggs and Samir Oliveros   Cast: Paul Walter Hauser, David Strathairn, Shamier Anderson, Walton Goggins, Maisie Williams, Haley Bennett, Brian Geraghty, Patti Harrison, Johnny Knoxville, James Wolk and Stefano Meier   Distributor: IFC Films

Grade: C+

An incident on a 1980s TV game show and the troubled contestant who caused it provide the inspiration for Samir Oliveros’ fact-based but highly embellished film, which is bolstered by some strong acting but undermined by an attempt to invest the episode with a degree of significance it can’t sustain.  Amusing at times and poignant at others, “The Luckiest Man in America” struggles when it employs surrealism to give depth to its protagonist and uses his story as a parable of broader cultural corruption.

On May 19, 1984, Michael Larson, an unemployed Ohio man, appeared on the CBS daytime show “Press Your Luck,” which offered players the chance to win “big bucks,” a phrase repeated endlessly by its host Peter Tomarken and contestants.  Players could get rich by answering trivia questions to win spins and then pressing a button during a spin to freeze a flickering, quickly changing board of boxes that offered a variety of prizes, mostly monetary (and usually including additional spins).  The drawback was that the board might instead land on a grotesque cartoon figure called The Whammy, which meant that the player lost all prizes accumulated thus far.

Larson stunned Tomarken, his fellow contestants Ed Long (Brian Geraghty) and Jamie Litras (Patti Harrison) and everybody else by running up a string of spins, without hitting a Whammy, that by the close of his appearance—so long that the tape had to be broken up to fill a second half-hour—had won him a total in cash and prizes of $110,237.  He did it by memorizing what long viewing of the show had revealed—the five patterns the flickering tiles repetitively took—and timing his button-pressing to land on one of the two tiles that in all five never had a Whammy.  It was suspected he was cheating, but he’d merely beat an inadequately complicated system, and it was eventually decided not to contest his winnings.

Oliveros and his team—production designer Lulú Salgado, costumer Carolina Serna and cinematographer Pablo Lozano, along with composer John Carroll Kirby—have meticulously recreated the look and sound of the original episodes (which you can watch on YouTube as well as streaming), and Hauser, Goggins, Geraghty and Harrison are careful to follow the dialogue from them pretty closely (whether minor deviations are theirs or come from the script by Oliveros and Maggie Briggs is unclear). So far, so good.

But the film juxtaposes that recreation with scenes of the consternation behind the scenes as those in the control room debated how to handle the embarrassing turn of events.  The discussion focuses on tension between Bill Carruthers (David Strathairn), here presented as the creator of the show (his co-creator Bill Mitchell is ignored) and his second-in-command Chuck (Shamier Anderson).  The latter had questioned whether Larson, whom he suspected of being “off,” should have been allowed to compete at all, while Carruthers appreciated his weird folksy charm.  When network programming executive Kaufman (Damian Young) shows up in the middle of the taping, the situation grows tenser.

Much of what happens in the control room is only loosely based on what actually occurred, and some of it is simply made up.  Carruthers was a real person, but the names of others, not just Chuck and Kaufman (modeled on an actual executive named Brockman) have been altered, and others on the staff are at best approximations of those who were there.   Attempts to distract Larson—placing a phone call to his estranged wife (Haley Bennett) and making Larson confront her on air, and shining a spotlight in his eyes when his “tile counting” had been discovered (something that didn’t occur until a staff post mortem)—are invented, as is Chuck’s removal of a phone Larson had been using surreptitiously to try calling home, or his breaking into his truck to investigate Larson’s collection of old show videotapes.

But even odder are the scenes when Michael, supposedly on break from taping, wanders about the studio and has off-putting experiences.  He’s frightened, for example, when a bevy of policemen inexplicably show up—are they real, or actors auditioning for a role?  And what to make of his supposedly stumbling into the taping of a talk show whose host (Johnny Knoxville) promptly plops him down in a chair to be interviewed?

All this and more leads to Larson’s mental deterioration, from which Carruthers must call him back to resume taping; by this time the staff has decided that his winning streak is a good thing for the show, because whether he’s cheating or not, his feat will turn him into a popular hero and increase viewership.  The whole episode thus becomes a microcosm of the acceptance of corruption in pursuit of success and profit in the medium, and by extension the larger society.

All of these additions aren’t just implausible—if they’d actually happened, the taping would have had to go on for hours, even days, and Larson’s unbroken streak would have been a sham (a real scandal, not just an embarrassment).  They also make things rather difficult for editor Sebastián Hernández, who has to try to smooth out the collision of fact and fiction, with only partial success.

One can understand the decision to beef up the story, since just recreating the show would have said little about the culture of the period, Larson’s character, or the dilemma faced in real time by Carruthers and his staff.  But inflating the tale as Oliveros and Briggs have chosen to do turns it into something rather preachy and lumbering, though the excellent cast play it all with commitment—Hauser, in particular, is very impressive. 

But a better choice might have been to go beyond the show to dramatize Larson’s later life, which proved that winning it big on TV might turn out to be more curse than blessing, especially for a fellow who was in reality an inveterate con-man always intent on finding the next big, easy score.  His is a real story about what the American dream means to many Americans. But that’s a part of Michael Larson’s story not to be found here.

To hear it, you might check out the documentary “Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal,” which you can also find on YouTube.