A CRIMINALLY GOOD TIME
‘Knives Out’, a starstudded take on an Agatha Chrisie story, is ingenious
The lies begin piling up early in
Knives Out, Rian Johnson’s magnificently crafted tale of murder and mayhem. Someone has slit the throat of Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), the 85-year-old patriarch of a family with deep pockets and an even deeper capacity for duplicity. His son-inlaw, Richard (Don Johnson), is hiding an extramarital affair.
His daughter-in-law, Joni (Toni Collette), has been secretly dipping into his fortune for years. But few lies are crueller, or less convincing, than the five little words we hear spoken near the beginning: “You’re part of this family.”
The brave young woman on the receiving end of that lie is Marta Cabrera (the superb Cuban actress Ana de Armas), Harlan’s nurse and, by all appearances, his one true friend. She’s the only person who’s genuinely heart-broken over the old man’s death, which makes it all the more bewildering that, cheap sentiments aside, none of his relatives thought to invite her to the funeral. Maybe they felt shamed by her decency. Or maybe it was just their latest mindless dismissal of Marta, who immigrated to the US from a Latin American country (their inability to remember which one becomes a brutal running gag) and is treated more like a domestic servant than a member of the family.
And so there’s an undeniable justice to the way Marta turns amateur sleuth, reluctantly enlisted by the famed private investigator Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig, a very choice ham). Harlan may be dead, but it is his family’s moral obliviousness, their obscene wealth and monstrous privilege, that Johnson keeps eviscerating in this extravagantly entertaining movie. Even among the many class-conscious dramas that have flooded theatres this season (Parasite, Hustlers and Joker come to mind), there is something particularly decadent about the eat-the-rich buffet that Knives Out serves up. To watch as the Thrombeys tear themselves apart is to experience a wave of Schadenfreude so heady and intoxicating that the revelations of whodunit and why almost feel like third-act bonuses.
Happily, those revelations were clearly not an afterthought for Johnson, a popsavvy, detail-driven filmmaker whose fondness for crime fiction has been in evidence since his 2005 high-school noir pastiche, Brick. Twisty, rug-pulling plot construction is one of his strengths as a filmmaker; it may also explain why his splendid contribution to the everexpanding yet rigidly fan-policed Star
Wars universe was so ill received in some quarters. In that picture, as in his 2012 time-travel fantasy, Looper, Johnson revels in the kind of labyrinthine storytelling that feels increasingly like a lost Hollywood art, a relic from a time when the studios produced fewer spoiler warnings and more actual surprises.
And so while Knives Out may superficially resemble an archly knowing spoof of Agatha Christie, the truth is that few spoofs demonstrate such consummate cleverness, such moment-to-moment mastery of the conventions they’re satirising. This is, to be sure, a riotously funny movie — a priceless collection of puns, insults, one-liners and some of the best-timed barf gags this side of Problem
Child 2 — but it also treats the classical detective story with the seriousness and grandeur it deserves.
Johnson revels in the old-school tropes of the genre: the juggling of time frames, the withholding of information, the reading of a will, the brandishing of blades and syringes. He can’t resist drawing out the piercing scream of the housekeeper, Fran (Edi Patterson), who discovers Harlan’s bloodied body, or stuffing some genial banter into the mouths of the police detectives (Lakeith Stanfield and a very funny Noah Segan) who are called to the crime scene.
While it doesn’t take much detective work to figure out where Knives Out’s own political sympathies lie, the movie’s larger point is that, when a dynasty is this corrupt, this mired in narcissism and nepotism, those individual leanings become entirely irrelevant. To paraphrase some of Johnson’s snarkier dialogue, extreme greed has a way of uniting conservative trolls and liberal snowflakes alike. And so as delectable as all this family squabbling is, only a few of the Thrombeys emerge as more than cardboard constructs. It’s no accident that the one who will eventually outshine them all happens to be the kindest and least financially privileged character in the movie. — Los Angeles Times