Movie Reaction: Knives Out

Formula: Murder on the Orient Express * Parasite

Murder mystery movies are a simple pleasure. They satisfy the most basic movie desires. There's a big question, and the whole movie is focused on giving you that answer. There's no playing with the ambiguities of life. A murder mystery that doesn't answer all your questions about plot mechanics is a failure. Plain and simple. It's very easy to judge a whodunit. What's also nice is that often the characters are not complex. Everyone is a type. The more exaggerated, the better. If a filmmaker includes all this and still wants to find space to rant about something with a bit more thematic heft, then more power to him/her.

You can call Knives Out a throwback or a genre exercise. There's a lot of coded language people use to describe something that's entertaining without being "substantial". I just call it a good time.

The story comes right out of an Agatha Christie novel (although this is a original story by Rian Johnson). A rich and successful mystery novel writer, Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), is found dead in his house in an apparent suicide. A week later, a private investigator (Daniel Craig) with an exaggerated Southern drawl (an accent that doesn't belong to any southern state) shows up to find out if it he was actually murdered. So, he rounds up all the family members and others around the house on the night of the death and questions them in order to piece together what happened that night. Every single family member fits a different idea you have about rich people.

• The "self-made" daughter who believes she followed in her father's footsteps by starting her own company. (Jamie Lee Curtis).
• The son who has made a career out of using his father's success: he handles the publishing of his father's books (Michael Shannon).
• The son-in-law who loves the country club lifestyle and thinks he's woke because he can lightly quote Hamilton (Don Johnson).
• The widowed daughter-in-law who fancies herself an internet influencer and no doubt has an Etsy account (Toni Collette).
• The adult grandson playboy who wears both his privilege his selection of sweaters and scarves proudly (Chris Evans).
• The SJW granddaughter going to a liberal college who pretends the family money doesn't mean anything to her (Katherine Langford).
• The teenage grandson who is an alt-right troll (Jaeden Martell).
• The trophy wife daughter-in-law (Riki Lindhome).
• His mother, who is somehow still alive, even though no one's actually sure how old she is (K Callan).

The other key individual is Harlan's full-time nurse (Ana de Armas) who he has befriended over the years.

Writer/director spends a long time winding it all up, introducing the characters and revealing their motivations. I don't mind that time spent though, because each character is interesting in his or her own way. Most have secrets. And, all the actors are having a blast in their roles. I have a hard time even picking a favorite character. Martell and Lindhome get short shirft. The movie never develops Martell beyond calling him a neo-Nazi, which would be a better zinger if we had any sense of his character. Lindhome just plain isn't a character. I imagine it's by design, but it is strange to see someone as funny as Lindhome in this and not be used. Toni Collette has some of my favorite line readings. Don Johnson has an effortless sleaziness to him. Jamie Lee Curtis plays on the Jamie Lee Curtis persona marvelously. I really could just recite everything I liked about the performances for a thousand more words. Instead, I'll just say that they are all deliciously awful people.

Well, except for Ana de Armas. She's the moral center of the movie. At least, that's how she starts off. I can't say anything about her by the end. This is a whodunit after all. Apparently, I've stumbled onto the perfect filmography to be familiar with de Armas. I've seen her in several movies, including Blade Runner 2049. This is by far her best showcase though. Previously, I've mostly seen her in "sympathetic hot girl" roles. Hopefully, this will lead to much better parts, because she really knocks this out of the park. I'd say more about Daniel Craig, except the trailers have said enough. He relishes every line he gets to say with this character. If this turns into a movie franchise with him solving assorted crimes, I'd happily watch more. This isn't really his movie though. He's just another accent (literally and figuratively).

Knives Out, as much as I liked it (it's certain to be in my yearly top 10), is "just" a murder mystery movie. Don't expect more out of it. It's not trying to be smarter than the genre. There's no attempt to mix it with anything else. Writer/director Rian Johnson gets to the resolution honestly. There is an answer. I found it satisfying. I didn't feel tricked. It's all there on the screen for the most part. My brain isn't wired to get obsessed with putting it all together before the movie is ready to tell me the answer, so I had a blast just going along for the ride.

Honestly. the only thing that bothered me about the movie was some of the class commentary. I liked what Johnson had to say about if in the film, but a couple aspects were more clumsily-handled than the rest. As I mentioned before, the alt-right grandson was completely pointless. He was more punchline than character. If he was going to be that pointless, just excise him from the movie. And, there's one scene that I've heard a lot of people praise, calling it "the dinner table scene". It's reminiscent to the stereotypical Thanksgiving, multi-generational political discussion in which the whole family carries on several arguments simultaneously. I didn't care for this scene. I thought it was much blunter than most of the rest of the movie's commentary. If felt like the movie didn't trust the audience to pick up its message otherwise, so it spelled it out in this scene. Maybe it won't bother me as much when I see it again, but it seemed really clunky this first time.

OK, this went way longer than I thought it would. I loved this movie. It's an expertly crafted ode to the murder mystery stories that came before it. The cast is game for it. The look and style of the movie is evocative. It never takes itself more seriously than it absolutely must. This was a pleasure to watch. I could watch 20 more movies just like it, or just enjoy this as a one-and-done. It's the nearest successor I can find to Clue.

Verdict: Strongly Recommend