THE QUEEN OF JIGSAWS
All the pieces fall into place in a charming film about a meek mum who puzzles her way through life
SOMeTIMeS a film is so quiet and uneventful, yet at the same time so full of tenderness and charm, that at the end you would stand up and cheer if such exhibitionism weren’t so utterly at odds with what you’ve just seen.
Instead you simply sit there, smile and maybe dab with a finger at the corner of your eye. Puzzle is such a film. It stars Kelly Macdonald, the wonderful Scottish actress whose ability to play a sweet, uncomplaining example of what the Americans call homemakers was recognised years ago by the Coen brothers.
Her performance as Carla Jean, the meek, loving, anxious wife of Josh Brolin’s ill-fated Llewelyn Moss in the Coens’ 2007 masterpiece No Country For Old Men was one of that great film’s many pleasures.
But in Puzzle, Macdonald’s exquisite performance as an unassuming, unassertive, devoutly Catholic homemaker is the principal pleasure; all the picture’s other virtues radiate from it. She plays Agnes, who is both cherished by her blue-collar New england family and taken completely for granted.
At the start, someone is celebrating a birthday. Agnes carries a cake ceremoniously into the room, but in fact the birthday is hers. She has made the cake, bought the candles, lit them, and now she blows them out, a deeply reluctant object of attention.
Her purpose in life, other than to attend Bible meetings, is to care for her husband Louie (David Denman), who runs a car-repair workshop, and their two teenage sons, Ziggy (Bubba Weiler) and Gabe (Austin Abrams). She sees it that way, and so do they.
At first, her domestic drudgery and its drab backdrop, even the clothes she wears, suggest a period piece, a story of small-town America perhaps set in the early Fifties.
We only learn this is the present because one of Agnes’s gifts is a smartphone. She does not welcome it — ‘like carrying a little alien robot in your purse’, she says — but is delighted to receive a challenging 1,000-piece jigsaw, which she completes in no time, then breaks up and does again. It is a map of the world, an irony not lost on us, even if it is on her; Agnes is the daughter of Hungarian immigrants, but could hardly be less worldly.
The short train journey to New York counts as a daring adventure for Agnes. But she undertakes it, because only there, in a shop called Puzzle Mania, can she find more jigsaws like the one that she has just completed.
She also finds an advert, ‘Champion Desperately Seeking Puzzle Partner’, and digging even deeper into reserves of boldness she didn’t know she had, answers it.
THIS leads her to wealthy, lonely Robert, a man as urbane as she is provincial, played with quirky, beguiling charisma by Irrfan Khan. The unlikely duo start practising for a doubles competition in the National Jigsaw Puzzle Championships.
If they win, they will go on to the world championships in Belgium. They appear to have a chance, because Agnes in particular has a genius for competitive puzzling that leaves even Robert agog.
But what all this also means is that she must somehow explain to her husband why she’s no longer reliably at home every afternoon, preparing his dinner and darning his socks.
A lesser drama would make him a demanding brute. But Louie is a decent cove who adores his wife, albeit preferably on his own terms. She is his puzzle, and maybe that’s the significance of the film’s title, because actually jigsaws are an irrelevance, though a delightfully wholesome one.
Agnes could have demonstrated a rare talent for juggling or mental arithmetic and the one-line synopsis would still be the same: a middle-aged woman seeing beyond the narrow horizons life seemed to have mapped out for her.
Moreover, as she grows in confidence, she begins to take charge of the relationships with the men in her life — Louie, her boys, even Robert. She learns how to be assertive with more than just jigsaw pieces.
Of course, this kind of personal growth is not exactly original cinematic territory — in fact, Puzzle is directly inspired by a 2009 Argentinian movie. But nothing about it feels derivative or predictable.