PUZZLE PIECES DON’T FIT

Lumbering metaphors, lazy writing ruin new desperate-housewife film

In the opening scene of Puzzle, a frumpy housewife excuses herself from her own birthday party to crawl on her knees around her living room and pick up the pieces of a shattered plate.

Agnes (Kelly Macdonald) is an introvert, so it’s a reprieve from the fun around her. She’s also someone who doesn’t know how to serve her own needs, finding what feels like refuge in keeping her home — as well as her bull-in-a-china-shop husband and their two angsty teenagers — intact.

But one glaringly obvious metaphor gives way to another in Puzzle, which follows Agnes as she discovers new-found joy and meaning literally one piece at a time, after being gifted a jigsaw game at that fateful party.

The film takes great pains to illustrate how sheltered Agnes has been — to the extent that she seems like one of the fossilized civilians in M. Night Shyamalan’s Village. She ogles an iPhone like a foreign object. She speaks in an oddly stilted mew, Macdonald’s Scottish accent dipping in and out. When her search for a bigger and more complicated puzzle takes Agnes from New Jersey ( because I guess they don’t have puzzles in the suburbs?) to New York City, everything from riding the train to speaking with strangers takes her comically far out of her element.

We get it; Agnes has lost herself in marriage and motherhood. But her struggle doesn’t need to be screamed from the rooftops, as screenwriter Oren Moverman ensures. If he has another Rampart (2011) in him, a film beautifully raw in its restraint, it’s hard to tell.

Macdonald, meanwhile, seems

as trapped in her career as Agnes is in life. Apart from her nuanced role opposite Steve Buscemi in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, she’s been stalled for the last decade in thankless bit roles.

In Boardwalk, there was a darkness beneath the saccharine, but in Puzzle, whatever lies beneath is never given a chance to breathe.

Where Puzzle excels is the frenetic, oddball chemistry between Agnes and Robert (a delightful, out-of-genre Irrfan Khan), who becomes both her partner in game play and in a sort of double life she begins to lead in the big city.

But even that is conspicuously forgotten in the narrative as Agnes juggles her family’s needs with a national puzzle tournament. After revealing her new hobby to her husband (a sadly typecast David Denman), his gently informs her as if he might break her, “Puzzles are for children.”

Of course, they aren’t really, at least not with this relentless metaphor. And insomuch as Agnes wishes her husband would take note of what’s missing between them and help piece their life back together, Puzzle carries a tinge of familiar sadness and displacement.

But Agnes never convincingly evolves. There’s certainly something to be said for discovering you have an interior life and choosing to honour it.

Despite a cute effort, Puzzle unfortunately seems to be missing that final piece.