MOVIE REVIEWS
KNIVES OUT
Starring Daniel Craig. In English, Spanish, and Italian, with English subtitles. Rated PG
➧ THE FORBIDDING red-brick house that holds all the humans in Knives Out is as much a character as anyone in this beyond-twisty tale of murder most fun. Like that mansion in The Haunting and the old hotel in The Shining, it’s not just a malevolent collector of our subconscious dreads and dreams. It’s also a celebration of storytelling itself—the fire-pit pastime that keeps us alive while we stare down the darkness.
To start with, there is an old woman who lives in this shoe: a something-genarian (TV veteran K Callan) whose son, a fabulously successful mystery writer called Harlan Thrombey, meets a fitting end on his own 85th birthday. Harlan is played by Christopher Plummer, so that tells you he won’t be gone long, regardless of how he died. His spooky New England manor is where local police interview the gathered suspects, I mean the grieving family. This includes an ecumenical council of roving resentments played by, among others, Don Johnson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Chris Evans, and Toni Collette.
One of the movie’s galloping gags has every member of the clan naming a different Latin-American country as the birthplace of Dad’s beloved nurse,
Marta—except Cuba, where up-andcomer Ana de Armas is actually from. Class assumptions drive all the characters here except for the real detective (reminiscent of the existential sleuths of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, with a touch of Graham Greene) in the form of Benoit Blanc. This tweedy gumshoe is played by Daniel Craig with a mint-julep accent that gives the whole thing a Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil vibe, to offset the New England chill.
Everyone’s alibis, excuses, and grand assertions are projected onto Blanc’s genteel screen, and the audience can draw on countless murder mysteries and real-crime stories to sort it out—and be wrong more than half the time. The movie’s slickest sleight of hand comes as writer-director Rian Johnson, taking a breather between Star Wars movies, gradually begins lacing his highballs with the bitters drawn from today’s grotesque social divides. That he manages to do this in such a hugely entertaining format, and in more than two hours of loop-de-loops, is down to his contagious delight in the power of shared stories themselves, regardless what brow they come from.
Sure, the movie has literary pretensions, but while its people may name- check Thomas Pynchon, they spend more time with Hallmark movies and Murder, She Wrote. This celluloid castle is built on countless tall tales, daily reinvented and seemingly as immortal as that ancient mother in the tower—the one who knows exactly when to spill the beans.
QUEEN & SLIM
Starring Jodie Turner-Smith. Rated 14A
➧ THE TIMELINESS and powerful intentions of Queen & Slim are inarguable, as are the talents on display. And the slickly shot movie has the kind of audaciousness people are yearning for right now.
Two happening Brits, Get Out star Daniel Kaluuya and Jett’s Jodie Turner-Smith, go American again to play the title characters, known only by their nicknames. Queen’s a lawyer and he’s a—well, we know he’s a Christian and a nondrinker, but not that much else. Their first date, a lessthan-tender Tinder affair, is already going wrong when he gives her a ride home and gets waylaid by an obviously sadistic white cop (country rocker Sturgill Simpson, no less). It’s no spoiler to say that this beginning ends badly, and the duo goes on the run.
Strangely enough, this bang-boom start only lowers the stakes for the remaining two hours of an interstate car journey that takes them from Ohio to the Deep South. The filmmakers say they wanted to follow the Underground Railroad in reverse, while observing a budding romance against the backdrop of chain gangs, rigid social rules, and steamy swamps—moral and otherwise.
Lena Waithe, a first-time feature writer, and director Melina Matsoukas worked together on “Thanksgiving”, the most arresting episode of the great Netflix series Master of None. Matsoukas has since helmed multiple installments of HBO’s Insecure, as well as key music videos for Beyoncé, Rihanna, and other top artists. There are some terrific set pieces here, along with smart nods to Langston Hughes and other touchstones of African-American history, including a visit to an antique-style
roadhouse, with Little Freddie King performing old-school blues.
Elsewhere, everyone from Lauryn Hill to Earth, Wind & Fire provides musical momentum. But the movie remains curiously static, with little urgency to remind us of the peril our fugitives are facing. Queen and Slim, now nationally recognized outlaws, meet plenty of interesting characters along the way, and the filmmakers are careful to subvert expectations about the “types” they encounter.
For all that, though, the leads grow more remote—icons, not intimates, you could say. Kaluuya’s mannerisms (the crouch and the glare) grow thin, and there are rookie filmmaking missteps, too, like the clichéd intercutting between the new twosome’s first sexual experience and a violent social protest miles away. The rest of the story is seen through their eyes, so it’s weird to break away to a (poorly filmed) event they don’t even know about. But such is the burden of iconography; symbols must carry far more weight than people do. And sometimes they can’t quite leave the page.
THE TWO POPES
Starring Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce. In English, Spanish, and Italian, with English subtitles. Rated PG
➧ THE TWO Popes is about much, much more than a pair of superannuated divinity students trying to bridge two seemingly different ways of looking at life. It focuses on the real-life tug of war between rival pontiffs, played out in history both recent and ancient.
The recent part centres on 2013 Rome, where we meet Joseph Ratzinger, the ultraconservative, German-born cardinal who became Pope Benedict, played here by Anthony Hopkins. He will ultimately yield his Vatican throne to Argentina’s reform-minded Jorge Bergoglio, as assayed by Jonathan Pryce. Both men bury their English mannerisms in favour of the alternately Teutonic and Latinate demands of their roles. Larger forces—fascism versus liberation, cynical worldliness against spirituality, et cetera— dominate a cinematic chess match envisioned by screenwriter Anthony McCarten, the New Zealander behind such pop-historical studies as the science-minded The Theory of Everything, the Churchillian Darkest Hour, and the Mercurial Bohemian Rhapsody.
Although Benedict, then 85, cited advanced age as cause for early retirement, the movie suggests that banking scandals and the ongoing child-abuse crisis were behind it. Furthermore, McCarten claims that the old-timer sees in the Jesuit Bergoglio (only nine years younger) a progressive way forward for the dwindling Catholic Church. When the latter is summoned from Buenos Aires to an unexpected papal audience, he discovers that his cranky superior has hidden depths, including a love of music that extends to the movie itself, which uses snippets of everything from ABBA and the Beatles to Mozart and Smetana to comment on theological dichotomies.
This is also a two-way confessional, although there’s very little of Ratzinger’s story, perhaps because his childhood in Nazi Germany is already so familiar, and because his particulars don’t lend themselves to a clear- cut narrative. (Conscripted into the Hitler Youth, the boy ignored his duties, and his father— a Munich policeman—was a vocal anti-Nazi.)
There’s far more time given to Bergoglio’s ambiguous sojourn through his nation’s cruel dictatorship, focusing on his inability, as a top Jesuit, to protect the more than 30,000 innocent people tortured and killed by the military. He himself was eventually exiled, and we get extended flashbacks, with Zama’s Juan Minujín as the young cleric, showing the brutal dissolution of normal life in a terror state.
This sometimes plodding concentration of detail is a reminder that the two-hour tale was directed, quite colourfully, by City of God’s Fernando Meirelles. He’s obviously mindful that his beloved Brazil is now led by a president who expresses eager nostalgia for the worst parts of South American history, and calls the current pope “a Communist meddler” for speaking out on behalf of the Amazon. In the end, the multilingual movie can be viewed as an advanced acting class, a truncated history lesson, or—most unusually— a call to locate what holiness remains afloat in this fetid ocean of sin.