Looking Through a Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

 

SPOILER ALERT

Spoilers ahead, most likely. I’ll try to keep them to a minimum, but honestly, I’m going to spill some beans. So:

If you haven’t seen “Glass Onion” but want to, don’t read this. Come back after you’ve seen it.

If you’re kinda sorta on the fence, maybe this will help you make up your mind (but you really should see it); but be aware, I’m likely giving up serious plot points.

If you have seen it already and/or don’t care about spoilers, let me know what you think!

END SPOILER ALERT

Right from the get-go, Rian Johnson establishes a brisker, tighter, and oddly, more expansive second entry in his “Knives Out” series. While the first was contained and intimate, there is a little bursting at the seams that became apparent to me on repeated viewings. Not that that detracted from my enjoyment of the film.

Here, Johnson’s canvas is more sprawling, in terms of locations, the variety of characters (not number), and thematically. It should be in danger of tipping over but the tensions in the narrative, principally between characters, but also just between the elements of the mystery itself are strikingly balanced. 

The writing feels tighter (which is saying something, since “Knives Out”’s script is pretty damn tight, but there is more weight to what Johnson is getting at with the above mentioned themes. The thematic richness of the film is right there in the title and only grows deeper and more transparent (sorry, but Johnson started it) as the tale evolves.

I’ll mention now that this is one of a number of films that have come out this year that takes a look at the ultra-rich, and skewers pomp and pretension deliciously. It’s far more subtle than either “Triangle of Sadness” or “The Menu”, the other two that come most readily to mind. Johnson is less interested in satire or caricature than in a slow-burn build up to a burning down of the dreams of a “vainglorious buffoon” (oh, the dialog…and Daniel Craig gets the lion’s share of ripostes; simply golden.)

Said buffoon is Miles Bron, a prime example of an already entitled white guy who fails upward to become one of the richest men in the world on the back of other people’s work, particularly his ex-partner Cassandra “Andi” Brand. Edward Norton just added another pivotal role to his already extensive resume and it’s a beaut. 

Bron and Andi were partners in charge of Alpha News and parted company, so to speak, over Klear, Miles’s hydrogen fusion fuel that he wanted to push out into the world with little testing and no oversight. When Andi decides to walk and take her half of Alpha with her to defund Klear and Miles’ monomania, he spins a testimony of lies at the trial and the rest of the cast joins him in perjury. 

Miles reminds me of so many tech bros or wannabe tech bros who struggle to be relatable. In a flashback, we see him annoying the shit out of Andi’s friends (the self anointed “Disruptors”) until he actually makes good with growing a media empire out of one idea. At that point, he’s invested in his friends to ensure that they go from a muscle bound nerd (Dave Bautista turning in more fine character work as “Duke”) to a social media influencer and spokesman for - sigh - men’s rights; from a barely making it actress/model to a clothes designer of some success (Birdie - a redolently stupid twit played with gusto by Kate Hudson); from an unelectable city council member to Connecticut governor (Claire Debella, Kathryn Hahn - she may have the least to do of the main cast, but she makes it count; hell, she’s just a joy to watch); from struggling chemist to Bron’s chief scientist on developing Klear, Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odum, Jr., with the least flashy role but he and Hahn’s Claire have the most to lose in the film since they are the most heavily invested in Bron’s scheme.

There. That’s a shit-ton of spoilage. But here’s the thing: no matter how much I sketch out, nothing can get across the execution of the film. I could conceivably lay out the entire film and not capture all the layers. And that’s kind of the point. Well, one of them.

This whole ensemble winds up on the malapropismatically inclined Miles Bron’s island in the Aegean (not the Ionian as Miles has it) Sea for a weekend murder mystery enactment. Benoit Blanc shows up to play the role of detective and seems quite chummy with Andi. Andi is obviously not happy to be there for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the utter betrayal by everyone present. I didn’t mention that Andi is played to perfection by Janelle Monáe who, if she wasn’t just remarkable as a musician, is once again turning in a performance of remarkable scope. Briefly put, the woman is mighty.

There is an easy going vibe to the performances initially that begins to curdle increasingly as more details are shared about how Miles has shafted people - not just Andi - while keeping them under his thumb. Norton is ridiculously good at playing this ridiculous man-child and - no, wait. I want to go in another direction for a bit.

What we find out is that Duke wants to get on Alpha News to expand his reach but Miles doesn’t want his dude-broism and boner pills on the platform. We find out that Klear is untested, unproven, and not ready for release but that both Toussaint’s and Debella’s reputations will be trashed with its release; Toussaint’s because his name is on the work and lack of due diligence and scientific rigor (including things like testing, ensuring safety measures and such like) will be mud if Klear explodes like the Hindenburg as Claire put it. Oh, and she’s going down when it gets out how much Bron has buried of her not so liberal associations and that she’s bent more than a few rules to get Klear in the development stage. Birdie? Bless her pea-pickin’ heart; she manufactures SweetiePants out of a notorious Bangladesh sweatshop and Miles said he’d bail her out if she takes the fall…because he’s the main investor. Lovely chap.

To some degree, they’re all idiots who have hitched their wagons to a fool but/and that becomes clearer the farther along the road we go. Words and recaps can’t do justice to the “thick as thieves” element in the air. Andi remains the elephant in the room that no one can quite figure out, though. Why is she there? She has nothing because Miles took everything from her. Nevertheless, she holds herself with a dignity that is wasted on the people and the proceedings. 

Oh. The “murder mystery”? Blanc solves it in two minutes after Miles announces it around the dinner table, pretty much ruining Bron’s weekend. It’s not the first or only time Benoit reduces a puzzle or a player to what seems to be his “elementary, Watson” move. Indeed, the invitations to the party were cached in a mechanical puzzle box that apparently Benoit solved in minutes where the others had to collaborate and bust their brains to work out.

As for Andi, we see her just chop it to bits. Hold onto that, for a … bit.

About Benoit briefly, Johnson has said and rightly, that the detective should never be the protagonist. If anything, the detective, in almost all iterations of the whodunnits is the audience surrogate. We see things the gumshoe should see, are often given the same clues and so on, and therein lies the fun of the genre. However, that’s not to say that we can’t learn more about the workings of the private eye in his private life. We know plenty about Holmes, Poirot, and Wimsey, and we do, to some degree, worry about their fates, but they are not the center of the tale. 

The exception in the broader detective/mystery genre would be more noirish works of Chandler, Hammett, Cain, and their descendants where the detective is at the center of things but often uncomprehending. Authors like Christie, Sayers, and Van Dyne were in the sites of Hammett and Chandler for their drawing room settings, frequently upper crust/aristocratic characters, and too nicely constructed plots. Johnson’s Blanc and his mysteries fall very much into that latter mold but with a marked distinction.

To date, both films have taken a rather sanguine look at the foibles of the wealthy and if “Knives Out” was a more mannered, more restrained affair in terms of critique, “Glass Onion” is not; it is very much looking at the blinkered excess of the wealthy and their utter lack of ethics or sense of responsibility to the larger community and even to each other. The beauty of it is that while you have a moral center in the form of Janelle’s Andi supported by Benoit Blanc, the deployment of critique is most assuredly comedic and biting. 

As for Blanc, Johnson has also reiterated that there will be no origin story or prequels. What we get here is a moment of home life with Benoit at wit’s end in the bathtub for lack of a challenging case. It’s only when he’s called out of the tub to receive a visitor that he is piqued by the idea of a weekend at Bronny’s. 

More is revealed in flashback, but hopping back to the spoiled mystery, Blanc has a sit-down with Miles and tells him that given that he’s invited five people - all with grievances - to a murder mystery in which he will play the victim, he has for all intents and purposes provided them with the idea of actually killing him. Bron dismisses it, but the theory gains resonance when once back downstairs, Duke goes into a seizure and dies after sipping a cocktail. The obvious thinking is that Duke was poisoned. 

When Lionel volunteers to call the authorities, he returns with the news that no boats can dock because the piers are only available at low tide. The technical word they used for this engineering marvel is “shit”. 

Andi is absent from the group and so is targeted as the murderer, Duke’s gun is missing, as is phone and Miles freaks out when he looks at his watch because - as part of the mystery weekend - the lights are timed to go out. Right. Now. Then we get into full bore freak-out by everyone else. Oh, and Whiskey, Duke’s girlfriend whom he put up to seduce Miles into putting Duke’s presence on Alpha shows up to say that she’s ransacking her room/going crazy. A fine kettle o’ fish, you ask me.

Rushing to the end of this part of the film, Andi and Benoit run into each other outside and Blanc tells her that everything is perfectly clear to him except for one thing, that only Andi knows and we will never know because at that moment, she is fatally shot right before Benoit Blanc’s eyes. 

Or is she?

Once Blanc and the party return inside, the flashback begins and I’ve already spoiled so much that I’m not sure if I want to go for a bigger reveal right now. However, I will say this: everything unravels and becomes clearer with that reveal and all these fabulously wealthy people do turn out to be less than you’d expect. 

Earlier in the night, Andi confronted the group by turning the tables on them. When she’s called the elephant in the room, she counters that she’s there to find out the truth. Duke rises and says he’ll be the bad guy and tells her that she had her chance, that she could have sucked from Miles’ “golden tit” (a recurring phrase), as well, but instead, she’s a loser. It’s a tense well-played moment and gives Andi momentum to leave the crowd.

Eventually, we learn that Andi had one last card to play; she emailed a picture of herself with a red envelope and a message that she had it and was willing to use it. Whatever “it” was. Well, it turned out to be the plans for Alpha that would have clinched Andi’s victory in court had it been in her possession at the time. She doesn’t discover it until after she’s lost the case and — well, it does play a part in the denouement of the film; hidden in broad lamplight in the Glass Onion, Miles’s Fortress of Solitude where behind glass is a Polaroid of the Disruptors and a fake schematic of the plans for Alpha. 

So how did we get there?

It has all to do with the visitor at Benoit Blanc’s. She arrives with a box, the same as the one that all the others had received. Benoit’s partner Phillip (I can’t give away who plays him…I just can’t) answers the door and calls to Blanc (still in the bath online with Angela Lansbury, Stephen Sondheim, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and others playing themselves.) There’s the chat on the balcony and a re-enactment of the film from a decidedly different perspective.

Once Blanc did get everyone back inside, what launched the flashback was his declaration of how transparent the whole charade was; hence, the flashback, which is Blanc narrating what he was actually detecting the whole time and how he was peeling each layer (even though, of course, it’s a glass onion and you can see right through to the center; and who’s at the center? Miles, naturally.)

As it happens, no one was trying to kill Miles but Miles did kill Duke. He handed his own drink of bourbon and pineapple to the pineapple-allergic Duke who - and he said as much early in the film - can’t have even a taste of pineapple. Anaphylactic shock and death claim the burly influencer and that’s not the only murder we encounter. 

Eventually, the original napkin is revealed and … huh. I forgot to mention that Miles also handed a crystallized version of Klear to Benoit Blanc early on. That’s important because it comes in handy shortly. Anyway, the original napkin is revealed and Miles lights it on fire, destroying the evidence that would settle Andi’s suit in her favor and no doubt send all the Disruptors to prison for perjury alone, let alone their individual malfeasance(s).

The REVEAL: if you’ve read this far, you might as well put a nail in it. What follows is the last piece of the puzzle and if you feel like you’re good and you don’t want anything else to be spoiled, you can quit now, close the browser window or read something else on Reaction Shots. But you’ve come this far, so I’m assuming you don’t really care or have seen the movie. Anyway, here’s another space so you won’t read it if you don’t want to.

By this point, Benoit tells Andi that he’s done what she hired him to do, he got her the truth but that is where his jurisdiction ends. However, he tells her that she will need a little courage and this - he slips the Klear into her hand - and yes, she blows it all up. 

Oh, Benoit Blanc’s visitor was Andi’s twin sister Helen, also played to perfection by Janelle. She rises from the dead because Andi’s journal took the bullet intended for her. Duke was poisoned because his phone was lighting up with reports of Cassandra’s death by suicide (it wasn’t: Miles killed her and made it look like a suicide and absconded with the envelope but didn’t destroy it; it would have proved Andi’s case because the Glass Onion Bar where the Disruptors met closed one year after the photo was taken and there was the bar’s logo on the napkin, missing from Miles forgery.)

It was Helen’s snooping and work behind the scenes that rendered the case increasingly more transparent. By the time she had blown up Miles entire compound (it was running on Klear…so, yes, they were on the Hindenburg), it was, um, clear, to everyone that the jig was up.

Now here’s where - despite my blowing all of this for you - nothing can really spoil this flick if you decide to watch it (assuming you haven’t). Miles and the Disruptors (“the shitheads” in Helen’s parlance) are the moral emptiness at the center of it all while Helen is the moral center of the film. It’s not just a formulaic study in contrast; it’s shot across the bow at where we are as a society. And no, Rian Johnson is not the preachy one here; that would be me. 

However, what is even more exacting in Johnson’s script is how at the end, the group turns on Miles with an eye to blowing him up a second time. They did see Miles car driving back from Andi’s, they did see the original napkin that he destroyed, they were willing to do the right thing, but only after they had lost or were losing that golden tit. Moments before, they had by their silence and shamed looks, told Helen that they saw no napkin; they were still hitched to the fool.

We end with Benoit enjoying a cigar with Miles’ stoner hanger-on Derol (one of Johnson’s good luck pals, Noah Segan) who has literally nothing to do with Miles or his schemes or much of anything. He’s just on the island to decompress from life’s struggles and stay baked. His refrain is simply “I’m not here” at all the right times to break the tension. Helen comes out and Blanc asks her, “did you get those sons of bitches?” She did. She very much did.

Visually, this film is a peach. Steve Yedlin, Johnson’s cinematographer since “Brick” (Johnson’s loyalty to the people in his career has paid off very, very well) shoots with a rich range of colors and exceedingly sharp edges here. Each scene is perfectly framed in a 1:85: 1 aspect ratio and I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a Golden Mean in some of the scenes and/or literal Fibonacci curves employed discreetly. I say this for a couple of reasons. 

One is that Miles claims that the Mona Lisa that he has in his living room is the real thing on loan from the Louvre for services rendered to a cash-strapped government. He had a connection with Da Vinci’s masterpiece from a young age and would tell people that he wanted to go down in history mentioned in the same sentence with the painting. Not that the piece is composed around a Golden Triangle, but it would make some sense if at any given point, some set-ups might be. They might be anyway, since it’s still a fairly solid basis for compositions in general. Another reason is that in the group’s solving of the puzzle box, Duke’s mother (yes, he lives with his mom…say no more) shouts out that it’s based on Fibonacci’s curve. There is a spiral staircase, but I don’t recall any overt circular motifs that come to mind.

I’m sorry I didn’t give more time here to either Madelyn Cline’s Whiskey; she dates Duke because he puts her on his platform but she has doubts about the longevity of the relationship if she goes into politics. Also, Birdie’s assistant Peg, played as earnest, lovely, and long-suffering of Birdie’s lack of self-awareness and/or intelligence by Jessica Henwick (a bright spot in the Russo’s slog “The Gray Man” and Colleen Wing on Marvel’s “Iron Fist” - not a great series, but she’s fine..oh, and “Game of Thrones…she’s versatile, to say the least), puts up with Birdie until she just can’t: Birdie’s email reply to learning that the sweatshop in Bangladesh was dangerous and exploitative was that it sounded perfect. She simply thought that sweatshops are where sweatpants are made. Yeah, you need to see the movie just for that moment. I can’t do justice to either Henwick’s nonplussed look or Hudson’s lack of comprehension about what she’s missing. 

And that’s not the only moment Birdie reveals herself having drawn the short straw of illumination. Consider this exchange between her and Benoit:

Birdie: Like Miles said, I’m a truth-teller. Some people can’t handle it.

Benoit: It’s a dangerous thing to mistake speaking without thought for speaking the truth, don’t you think?

Birdie: Are you calling me dangerous?

How Daniel Craig didn’t visibly roll his eyes, I don’t know. Speaking of: Craig is clearly having a blast in this role. While the accent is Kentuckian, he’s able to lay it on thicker by turns, particularly when he wants to lay out “Southern hokum”, and as withering as the above riposte should be (and others like it), it never comes off as nasty. There’s a genuine decency to the character that renders him as far from James Bond’s “blunt instrument” as a character and the actor portraying him could get.

Speaking of #2: His dock doesn’t float. His wonder fuel is a disaster. His grasp of disruption theory is remedial at best. He didn’t design the puzzle boxes. He didn’t write the mystery. Et voila! It all adds up. The key to the entire case. And it was staring me right in the face. Like everyone in the world, I assumed Miles Bron was a complicated genius. But why? Look into the clear center of the glass onion. Miles Bron is an idiot! 

Now the beautiful part of this is that Miles is standing right there as Benoit lights into him and with all the self-awareness of a Birdie retorts with petulance/exasperation:

Oh, please! Just tell us who tried to kill me!

To which Blanc replies with greater exasperation:

Nobody tried to kill you, you vainglorious buffoon!

This. This is why I love movies. Oh, and the soundtrack is bitchin’, too.

Additional Thoughts:

Jeremy Renner needs to make a hot sauce and Jared Leto should get behind a hard kombucha. I want both these products. 

“Infraction point” might be my favorite malapropism. 

I also am aware that class critique carried out by comfortable, if not wealthy performers Carrie’s within it its own contradiction, but unlike the wealthy whose wealth comes from legacy or even investment, wealth arrived at through creating entertainment, if not art, is less offensive. Besides, most artists know what struggling is like and if the one percent who make it to major stage or screen work and the one percent of that who make it to serious stardom have done so after years of anonymity, waiting tables, digging ditches or working in customer service, then I’m good with it. There will be, of course, those who forget where they come from, and they are, to use Helen’s words, shitheads; but for the most part, I’ll support a solid bit of agitprop from major studio talent any day of the week.