The Pen in Hand Guide to the Movies: Review of "Lucky Hank"

Stuck in The Middle: Review of AMC Streaming Series Lucky Hank

By Geoff Carter

Hank Devereaux, Jr., (Bob Odenkirk), the protagonist—he can hardly be said to be a hero, except perhaps in an accidental sense—is a man mired in the mixed blessings of the life of an academic. He is an English professor at middling Railton university, a bastion of mediocrity (as he himself calls it), married to a beautiful and intelligent wife, Lily (Mireille Enos), and father to a fragile and needy daughter Julie (Olivia Scott Welch) and her decidedly useless husband Russ (Daniel Doheny).

This is the setting for Lucky Hank, the AMC series created by the minds behind the popular Better Call Saul, also starring Odenkirk. The program is based on the novel Straight Man by Richard Russo, a copy of which coincidentally was given to me by my PhD advisor, a tenured professor at a small university. Is life imitating art?

Anyway, the series opens with Devereaux, a one-time novelist, teaching a creative writing class. One of his students is complaining about the professor’s detachment from his students, their work, and the subject itself. Hank, a bastion of frustration, loses it, telling his students that they are mediocre, the school is mediocre, and that he is mediocre. Hank is apparently a composite of a classic mid-life crisis, alienation, and general ennui. He is the reluctant head of an English Department he does not wish to lead—and who can blame him? HIs department is decidedly unbalanced.

Professors Gracie DuBois (Suzanne Cryer) and Paul Rourke (Cedric Yarborough) bicker and are always at each other’s throats, Billie Quigley (Nancy Robertson) is constantly drunk, Finny (Haig Sutherland) consistently and pretentiously spouts quotes from the literary canon, and the married academics Teddy and June Washington-Chen, (Arthur Keng and Alvina August, respectively) reinforce each other’s insecurities and are constantly seeking reassurance and reaffirmation. Like some real-life academic departments, it is a rat’s nest of ego, intrigue, and betrayal—and a modicum of cluelessness. As the series opens, the college administration is threatening to cut jobs causing a furor of anxiety in the English department.

As bleak as this situation may sound—and maybe because of the bleakness, Lucky Hank is a beautifully drawm comedy. Hank’s ineptitude, reluctance to act, and sort of informed helplessness as department head lend him sort of accidental hero status. When told to create a list of professors to be laid off, he procrastinates and ulitmately refuses to act, partly out of professed moral outrage, but mostly out of fear. His hedging and hesitations are reflective of Hank’s malaise—middle-age inertia. He can’t move—anywhere—out of fear and insecurity—but knows it and hates himself for it. Hank, though he would never admit it, is trapped by fate. When his estranged father, who happens to be a world-famous novelist—something Hank never attained—threatens to move back near his son, our hero is beset with decades of unrequited and futile anger. This situation, like nearly everything else in his life, is beyond his control. Even his rebuke to his father for abandoning and ignoring him, a conversation Hank has imagined countless times, has become—because of circumstances beyond Hank’s control—moot.

Bob Odenkirk’s portrayal of Hank is masterful. Beneath his sardonic and sophisticated exterior lies an ever-present undercurrent of sadness and regret. The set of the mouth, the sad eyes, and the quick frown telegraph this even as Hank will trade barbs with Gracie or Paul or Billie. He is a loving and loyal, though distracted husband; Hank is also, in the face of his daughter and her idiotically aimless husband, completely bewildered. In short, he is the face of middle-aged manhood.

Odenkirk’s querulous voice, always sounding as if he is always asking a question, perfectly embodies the sort of bewilderment and angst of a man attempting to come to terms with a life he doesn’t particularly like, although, like any good teacher, he does attempt to help others avoid his own perceived mistakes. He lies to Meg Quigley (Sara Amini), a young lecturer and family friend who is seeking a professorship, telling her that she won’t have a job in the coming year. He tells her this to get her out of Railton—for her own good, of course. When Julie, his whiny and clingy daughter complains about her life and husband, Hank suggests she move, to which—in a classic spoiled daughter response—she replies, “Are you trying to get rid of me?” Of course not. Hank just doesn’t want her to get caught in an existential cul-de-sac like his.

When Lily, his wife, gets a job teaching in New York City—something Hank has encouraged her to do—his glibly ironic persona is torn open. Although he won’t say so at first, he doesn’t want her to go. And he doesn’t want to—or can’t—leave Railton College.

Hank’s best friend Tony (Diedrich Baber), a philosophy professor, is in the same boat but seems to be completely sanguine about his situation; he’s mostly concerned about getting laid. Dean Rose (Oscar Nunez) is also a man who has lost control of his career and his moral center. Unlike Hank, who refuses to put any of his people on the chopping block, Dean Rose is scared to death of the powers that be.

For all his inertia and reluctance, Hank has not lost his moral center. He refuses to make a list, and even though he will not, through masterful passive aggressive strategizes, follow Paul’s advice to unionize, manages to somehow subvert Dickie Pope (Kyle MacLachlan), the ruthless college president’s plan for massive faculty layoffs.

Lucky Hank is funny. The writing is crisp and intelligent, the comic acting of the entire cast is brilliantly done. The comic timing between Odenkirk and Robertson is flawless. Cryer’s depiction of the brittle and neurotic Gracie DuBois (a tribute to Blanche?) is spot-on. Enos provides a perfect understanding foil for Hank’s chronic emotional paralysis while Scott Welch’s childish rants and cluelessness are dead-on accurate.

The theme of middle-aged incapacity is nothing new. For a while, George Clooney had tapped into the mother lode of that vein with his work in The Descendants, Up in the Air, Michael Clayton, and even Fantastic Mr. Fox. Bob Odenkirk has, however, taken the archetype of the disillusioned and maybe embittered middle-aged man to a different place. Not unlike Clooney’s broken men, Odenkirk’s Hank is searching for meaning and survival in a rapidly changing world, but unlike the others, he is looking beyond self-preservation, and, even with the most unlikely methods, he is working for the greater good. He is a man—almost despite himself—living outside of himself.

Hank Devereaux, Jr., is, against all odds, a hero. He is like one of those guys in Tarzan movies who grab a stick and slowly and agonizingly pull themselves from the quicksand. Except Hank will never make it