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 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.
Hats off to first-time director Marc Turtletaub, who has made a really terrific job of shaping the screenplay, by Oren Moverman and Polly Mann, into a lovely, sensitive, moving film.
Barry KeOgHan, the gifted, 25-year-old Irish actor whose own backstory is as dramatic as many films — he was 12 when his mother died of a heroin overdose and was raised in 13 foster homes — is deservedly moving centre-stage after a number of prominent supporting roles.
In American Animals, the true story of a precious-books heist, he excels as Spencer reinhard, the middle- class college student who in 2004 hatched a plan to steal a near-priceless first edition of John James audubon’s 19th-century study The Birds Of america, from the library at the bizarrely named Transylvania University in Kentucky.
It’s more a fantasy than an actual scheme, at least until Spencer joins forces with hotheaded Warren Lipka (evan Peters), for whom a robbery offers the perfect respite from an unhappy home life.
Once they have recruited two more accomplices, they have the manpower, but not necessarily the nous, to carry out such an audacious theft.
First- time writer- director Bart Layton allows events to unfold with a distinctly comedic edge, referencing reservoir Dogs and even Jaws, which makes his movie both extremely watchable and thoroughly disingenuous. after all, the heist was not remotely funny for librarian Betty Jean gooch (ann Dowd), targeted by the gang of four for ‘neutralising’. The actual miscreants pop up throughout with their chirpy, direct- to- camera reminiscences, further blurring the line between callous crime and comedy caper. But if you don’t object to them being portrayed as engagingly hapless rather than deeply misguided, there is plenty here to enjoy, including a great soundtrack (The Doors, Small Faces, ramones, Donovan). n THE Miseducation Of Cameron Post also deals with the travails of a group of american youngsters, though they are hardly the architects of their own misery. Cameron Post (the excellent Chloe grace Moretz) plays a lesbian teenager packed off to a corrective religious school, named god’s Promise, so that she might be ‘cured’ of her same-sex attraction.
This isn’t 1893, incidentally, but 1993.
Desiree akhavan’s film, based on emily M. Danforth’s novel of the same name, has distinct echoes of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s nest.
In particular, Jennifer ehle plays the principal, Dr Lydia Marsh, as a marginally more humane version of nurse ratched in Milos Forman’s 1975 classic.
She and her well-meaning brother rick (John gallagher Jr), who has himself had to overcome homosexual impulses, try to convince their young charges that, at their age, they are especially vulnerable to ‘evil’.
Happily, the film itself is a good deal less preachy than they are. It’s sensitive, touching and beautifully acted.