The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Macdonald finds the missing pieces in new film ‘Puzzle’
Two times out of three, this is what performers do for a living: come up with something juicy and alive, working with material composited from cardboard and good intentions. Often there are pieces missing from the roles they play, and not in a tantalizing way. The resourceful actor finds them, often between the lines.
Take Kelly Macdonald in “Puzzle,” the English-language remake of a 2009 Argentinian film. The unassumingly terrific Scottish actress, who made her screen debut in “Trainspotting” (1996), plays Agnes, a first-generation HungarianAmerican homemaker devoted to her Bridgeport parish but an isolated soul. She’s bound by tradition and habit to making meals, and life in general, comfortable for her auto mechanic husband (David Denman) and her sons (played by Austin Abrams and Bubba Weiler).
In the opening scene, the darkly lighted interiors suggests a story taking place in 1947 or thereabouts, as Agnes goes about setting the table and decorating the dining room for a birthday party. It’s her own, it turns out. Clearly this servile character has been living for others for too long.
Agnes is a whiz at jigsaw puzzles, and “Puzzle” gives its central motif a considerable symbolic workout. Taking a rare trip into Manhattan one day, she visits a puzzle shop and answers someone’s ad for a puzzle partner. Irrfan Khan (“Life of Pi”) plays Robert, recently divorced, fabulously wealthy, indolently spending his days watching cable television and footage of natural disasters. With so much random, destructive