A 90-year-old atheist has outlived and out-smoked his contemporaries, and as he comes to terms with his own mortality, he searches for ever-elusive enlightenment. So reads the blurb for the movie Lucky. I hadn’t read that before we decided to go. It wasn’t my pick. I’m not sure I’d have gone, had it been left to me to decide. Which would have been a shame.

A veil of reflection settled over the audience as the credits rolled. I’m sure everyone was contemplating their mortality and resolving to make a will and draft an end-of-life plan. Even if you don’t have much by way of anything material, an end-of-life plan seems like a good idea. It’ll make little difference to you – as you’ll be gone. But it might make it a little easier on those you’ve left behind. Note to self duly made.

It reminded me a little of another favourite – The Station Agent.

When his only friend dies, a man born with dwarfism moves to rural New Jersey to live a life of solitude, only to meet a chatty hot dog vendor and a woman dealing with her own personal loss.

Both are slow movies with not a whole lot going on, on the surface, but they run deep. In Lucky, the late Harry Dean Stanton played the leading role. He died in September last year, aged 91, a few months after the film was released. What a poetic last movie to have worked on.

It got me thinking. About death. About how I want to die. About burial vs cremation. About how long I’ve left to do all the things I want to do. About what exactly it is I want to do. About what’s important. About what matters. About the sort of funeral I’d like. About making a will. About the burden and responsibility that comes with owning property and having stuff. About obligations and whether they’re real or perceived. About the attractiveness of Jack Reacher’s life on the road. About the increasingly frequent urge I’m getting to step outside the circus ring and swap the insanity for simplicity. About how happy I feel inside when I’m telling people of the beauty and solitude of the kis-Balaton.

I made a conscious decision last year to step back and reduce my level of commitment. I promised myself that I would be more respectful of my time and learn to say no, politely but emphatically. I won’t change overnight. It’ll take a few months to work through it. I’m making slow but steady progress, though, and for the first time in a long, long, time, I have time. And for that I’m grateful.

As for the movie:

On Rotten Tomatoes, Lucky has a rating of 98%, based on 92 reviews, with an average score of 7.9/10. RogerEbert.com gave the film four out of four stars, writing that the film is “the humblest deep movie of recent years, a work in the same vein as American marginalia like ‘Stranger Than Paradise‘ and ‘Trees Lounge,’ but with its own rhythm and colour, its own emotional temperature, its own reasons for revealing and concealing things.”