OK, full review (or thoughts in some vague order), more than just “I loved it”:
Saw
Knives Out Saturday and, despite a few qualms, pretty much loved it. The movie loves the genre so much and such fun with it that it’s difficult not to get swept away in the web it weaves (to mix metaphors badly). Craig, for one, seems to having a ball with it—his Kentucky-fried Hercule Poirot, Benoit Blanc, is a hoot, and everyone I was with has already quoted “doughnuts within doughnuts” to each other!
The real standout is Ana de Armas, who plays the lead. She’s magnificent in the picture, going through a gamut of emotions with ease, and I kept asking myself where has she been and why haven’t I heard of her. She’s remarkably, if gently, beautiful, too, with these gorgeous, expressive eyes. I hope this leads to bigger and better things; if this performance is any judge, she deserves them.
I was taken aback by the plotting structure, which
seems so clichéd at the beginning that the first,
Columbo-esque twist comes as a complete surprise. Certainly I knew that that flashback wouldn’t be the whole story, but I got lost in a dizzying array of red herrings. No, it’s not as dazzlingly complex as
The Last of Sheila or even, to a lesser degree,
Clue, two clear inspirations, but delivering on a fair-play, red herring-filled murder mystery at all nowadays is a triumph. And the “you did this”/“Hugh did this” clue may well go on my list of the greatest clues ever in detective fiction (no, no, I, um, no, I don’t have a real list like that, no way…), along with the sundial in “Who Shot Mr. Burns,” the nail polish in
Death on the Nile, and the two men tangoing in
Black Aura.
Anyway, there’s just mad genius in advertising your movie as a murder mystery, apparently shooting that murder mystery to blazes by revealing the culprit, and watching that culprit try to hide and fake evidence to lead the detective off-track—just to reveal that, surreptitiously, it
has been a mystery all along, as advertised. That’s the kind of thing
Anthony Berkeley would have done (and did).
As for the twists: I think they’re fine. Again, not dazzling, but quite good nonetheless. I knew that Miss de Armas’ Marta was not the culprit, though I strongly suspected Christopher Plummer (as delightful and sprightly as ever at 89) of having planned the whole thing himself, including switching the vials, and Craig of being in on it. I did figure out that the culprit was Chris Evans in the restaurant scene, though I wasn’t sure, and I certainly didn’t pick up on the beautifully-placed clues. To some degree, I would have preferred it if Blanc were
Philip Trent-ing the whole thing—that is, if he weren’t as brilliant of a detective as he appeared to be. But that’s a minor thing.
Again, the acting was exceptional, with every cast member bringing his or her a-game; of the supporting players, Michael Shannon is a particular standout. The problem is, Johnson’s script focuses so much on de Armas and Craig that the family themselves don’t get that much time, with Jamie Lee Curtis and Toni Collette oddly underused. Compare that to, again,
The Last of Sheila and
Clue, where even the suspects who weren’t killer, victim, or detective were still excellent, if intentionally overplayed, character-portraits who got a lot of screen time. That said, Chris Evans’ character is hilarious—he’s so wicked and rotten that any memory of Captain America fades away, as was no doubt intentional.
Political
subtext: do I really need to talk about this? It’s there, but for the most part the liberal Johnson tries scrupulously not to take a side.Â
Yes, the immigrant Marta is far better than these rich, whiny brats, which I guess you can argue is subtext if you really want to, but the film also points out that she’s legally in the country, even if Mom and Sis aren’t. There is a funny immigration debate in which, again, Johnson (and Marta) doesn't take a side.
Qualms. At the beginning, Johnson had too many close-ups, to the extent that it got annoying, but that tendency faded as the movie went on. Johnson has always struck me as a promising writer-director who’s never been more than promising:
The Brothers Bloom started off wonderfully but quickly descended into mediocrity, and
The Last Jedi was just poorly directed and acted. (
Brick, more interesting than either of these, is so stylized that I couldn’t connect with the story or any of the characters, though I appreciated Johnson’s emulation of and admiration for Dashiell Hammett’s work. I haven’t seen
Looper.) But here nearly everything
works.
This is a movie to be savored. It’s probably the best American mystery movie in recent years, which wouldn’t be that much of an accomplishment were it not that Hollywood
has started making mysteries the last few years. (Maybe Kenneth Branagh should hire Rian Johnson to write his
Death on the Nile?) What a delight.
Oh, and one extremely subtle joke: in one scene, Craig is jamming to a musical theater song on his iPod, something that, believe it or not, even I don’t do. That song is “Losing My Mind,” from
Follies—written by the great Stephen Sondheim. Sondheim, famously, is not only one of the greatest composer-lyricists Broadway has ever produced but also a murder-mystery fanatic—who co-wrote the script for
The Last of Sheila. See, I told you it was extremely subtle.
