The Last Whodunnit: “Knives Out”

I’ve seen all of Rian Johnson’s theatrical releases. That’s more than I can say of many directors whose work I’m fond of. It helps that he only has five, but each one is almost perfectly crafted. That includes the somewhat divisive “The Last Jedi”, but “Brick”, “The Brothers Bloom”, “Looper”, and the aforementioned addition to the Star Wars canon are all compelling stories, well-written, and often, immersive experiences.

I will be the first to admit that I have never solved a murder mystery. I love the genre in literature and film, but not only have I never solved one, I can’t imagine writing one. I tried once. It was wretched. And shit. It was shit.

But “Knives Out” is not shit. It is the farthest thing from shit. It is a percolating stew of family dissonance and antipathy. It is a drawing room drama. It is donut with a hole filled by another donut with a hole in it. It boasts some of the tightest performances in a mainstream film with mainly entertainment on its mind. But of course, there’s more there than meets the eye.

For sure, each time you think you know where the case is going, it stops and reconfigures. It helps that there is expert use of “Rashomon” style cuts to the selective recall of various suspects, it’s borderline Monty Pythonesque when a car chase peters out into anti-climax (far funnier when you see it than me writing about it), and it’s a remarkably slick tour de force of performances and plotting.

Additionally, the way Rian slowly but steadily mounts a critique of the sense of entitlement and pulls the carpet out from under the Thrombley family’s coterie of noveau riche moral vacuums is subtle enough to not detract from the proceedings. To be sure, many noir and other examples of this genre often posit the wealthy as sleazy or corrupt and the marginalized and disenfranchised as the exploited but here, the class critique is more nuanced because at the center of it, is a Ana De Armas’s Marta, the nurse who attended to Christopher Plummer’s Harlan Thrombley till the very end. The relationship is genuine friendship and it’s obvious that Harlan trusts Marta and is concerned for her well-being.

Blanc. Benoit Blanc.

Marta is a rock-solid, genuinely good person throughout as Daniel Craig’s Benoit “the last gentleman sleuth” Blanc reminds us. The understatement of Craig’s performance is belied by his Kentucky fried accent. Blanc himself is a man of principle and despite his stated position of staying in the background, his is a pronounced presence in asking the right questions at the right time and keeping Marta close in what appears to be a two-fold aegis. On the one hand, she’s the most honest of the ensemble with nothing to gain from Harlan’s demise (suicide by cutting his own throat) and at the same time knowing how privy she is to the family’s secrets. She also cannot lie. If she does, she pukes.

Harlan dies. He has substantial assets from his writing and real estate and is, as we hear repeatedly, a self-made man. Over a period of a few days leading up to his 85^th birthday, he tells his children one by one that they’re cut off. His son Walter (Michael Shannon in a role that turns everything about Shannon you thought you knew on its head) runs the publishing business and attempts to get Harlan to licence his characters to other media, something Harlan declines to do repeatedly. But Harlan tells Walter that he wants him to make something of his own, to not rely on dad to provide.

Walter is not a very strong person and doesn’t grasp why his father is doing this. But then, none of them do. Except, perhaps, for Linda, an incandescent Jamie Lee Curtis. Linda built her own business from a million dollar loan from her father, to whom she was close and with whom played sleuthing games as a child. What she doesn’t know is that her husband, an ineffectual and casually conservative clod played expertly by Don Johnson has been having an affair. Add to that that her son Ransom is an arrogant waste of skin bag played by Chris Evans as the anti-Steve Rogers and you smell the offal.

He's so not Capt. America...

Harlan doesn’t cut off Linda. He doesn’t have to. But he does tell Ransom that he will be getting nothing from Harlan’s will. On the night of his birthday party, Ransom and Harlan have words and he leaves early. He skips the funeral and we don’t see him really enter the picture until what felt like about half-way in.

By that time, we’ve also been introduced to Joni, Harlan’s skin-care/new age “influencer” (Toni Collette doing it again…can this woman not turn in a bad performance? Does she always have to nail it??? Thank god she does; her turn here is as good as anything she’s done) dingbat daughter-in-law, whose husband passed away but who had been receiving support for sending her daughter Meg to school.

Also, somewhat in the background are two less pronounced members of the Thrombley clan, Walter’s wife Donna (Ricki Lindhome) and his son, a mini-Breitbart troll, Jacob played by Jaeden Martell with just the right amount of self-interest that you could see him growing up to be Ransom, only even more entitled and repulsive.

Last of the household is caretaker Fran (Edi Patterson, who after Marta, is the most sympathetic of the characters). A note about these last three. In every whodunnit, there are the secondary, sometimes tertiary characters that often get overlooked or underplayed because of their minimal importance to the story. This is not the case here. Every one of these character’s beats land. No one is a sketch here. Lindhome’s Donna doesn’t come to the fore until a critical unravelling when Harlan’s will is read, Jacob is a presence used sparingly except to underscore the rot of privilege and even then, he’s not a caricature. And Fran is pivotal in a way that I can’t talk about here without spoiling the whole damned affair.

It would be flat-out wrong to not point out that LaKeith Stanfield’s Lieutenant Elliott and Noah Segan’s Trooper Walker (a huge Harlan Thrombley fan) are supporting players that provide Blanc with a firewall between his investigation and the family. It’s much needed because I wonder how long it would be before the estimable detective would lose his patience and proceed to dope-slap these idiots.

But there’s an additional rub here; they’re not all idiots. You get a palpable sense of their stunted natures and rat-like venality but Meg is sympathetic and even Linda handles herself differently from her kin. However, as the film wears on, increasingly the self-serving aspects of their natures comes out. So much so, that when it erupts in a major reveal, you do step back and wonder if you might not act similarly and then balk because, well, there’s a world of invective levelled at Marta that belies the movie long trope of how much a part of the family she is, despite the repeated flubbing of where she’s from (a running gag as various characters say she’s from Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Brazil).

Certainly, Marta is a benign presence for the Thrombleys but her story is so tangential to them that they aren’t aware until later that her mother is undocumented (though Marta herself is legal.) Harlan must have known but we still see just enough of her home life to piece together the strain of what the family has to deal with. Marlene Forte as Marta’s mother brings a fullness to the role that rings true to the fraught experience of the immigrant.

The eye of the storm.

I haven’t said much about Ana de Armas or Christopher Plummer’s performances. While de Armas has more screen time, the chemistry between both is palpable. Plummer’s Harlan is a decent man who no doubt has been pained to see what his progeny have become and takes pains to mitigate as he moves toward the end of his time here. Plummer is a joy to watch and over the years, growing up watching him, I’ve been increasingly impressed with his evolution into one of the finest actors of our time.

Then there’s Ana de Armas, the Cuban actress whose biggest role prior to this was as Joi in “Bladerunner 2014”. Here she embodies decency and a fully realized sense of integrity while doing her best to cover up what turns out to be an unnecessary escapade. She is the heart of the script and she is the axis around which Craig’s Benoit and Plummer’s Harlan spin. Both actors elevate their game to match the humanity of de Armas’s work here. Both actors are also playing the moral supports to this beleaguered woman at the center of a storm that shifts and changes direction frequently. She’s the eye of the hurricane, for sure.

I’m refraining from spoiling the film for two reasons. One, a murder mystery should be unspoiled in principle. I’d waive that for any older film (seriously, if you haven’t seen “The Maltese Falcon” or “The Thin Man” or, hell, “Murder on the Orient Express”, then I don’t know what to say), but this is too much of a treat. As it is, I’ve probably sketched far too much in to not have provided too many clues.

The second reason is that as much as I love the plot itself, it’s the characters and their individual journeys that provide the fuel for this film. The plot is secondary to the portraits drawn here. There’s not a bum turn by anyone in the cast, and I’d argue that for everyone here, this is remarkable work.

Johnson’s directing is no less tighter here than any of his other films. It’s telling when you could argue that his weakest (and it’s still a great piece of action filmmaking to me) is a Star Wars movie. He retains his cinematographer Steven Yedlin who’s lensed all of Johnson’s features; but equally important, is the set design. David Schlesinger has actually populated a mansion with enough details to breathe additional life into the deceased Harlan Thrombley. You derive a firm sense of the man from the environment and there’s not a wasted visual element in it.

There’s also not a thrown away line, either. Visual references to knives are as subtle as the dialog. Placement, reference, and of course, usage factor into the plot but also provide shadings of the characters. One character references that another wouldn’t know a real dagger from a stage dagger and this is hilariously borne out later.

The game of Go is likewise a metaphor, a clue, a pivot. This film is so damn much fun, it demands to be seen twice. Or more. It’s worth seeing a second time, too, because – as with many in the genre – the second time around gives you room to take in other elements you may have missed the first time. In the best art, the more you look at it, the more it reveals. Something tells me, I’ll be just as satisfied on the next viewing.