The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Haunted by the ghost of Agatha Christie
Director Rian Johnson on his homage to the doyenne of murder mystery – and life after the ‘Last Jedi’ backlash
Alfred Hitchcock, storied master of suspense, was no fan of the whodunit. “They’re simply clever puzzles, aren’t they?” the great man once sniffed. “They’re intellectual rather than emotional, and emotion is the only thing that keeps my audience interested. I prefer suspense rather than surprise – something the average man can identify with.”
Almost half a century later, when sketching the outline of his own murder mystery film, Knives Out, Rian Johnson found himself turning Hitchcock’s point over in his mind. Johnson – a 45-year-old writer and director whose previous film was a small studio picture called Star Wars: The Last Jedi – had been obsessed with whodunits since childhood, after pulling his parents’ copy of Agatha Christie’s Curtain off the bookshelf and being struck by “how scary and grown-up its cover looked”, with its daggersdrawn typeface and portrait of the mustachioed detective looming out from a shadowy backdrop. But in the intervening years – having ploughed through countless books by Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, John Dickson
Carr and others – he’d also come to realise that Hitchcock’s quibble was essentially right.
“The weak spot is invariably the middle,” he explains over coffee on a cold autumn morning in London. “It can become a drawn-out gathering of clues all in the service of one big surprise at the end.” The solution he landed on was to write a whodunit that crumbles into a Hitchcock thriller halfway through, before pulling itself together in time for the customary drawing-room showdown.
Giving antique tales a modern polish has long been the Johnson way. Brick, his 2005 Sundancewinning debut, was a hard-boiled private-eye yarn set in the suburban Californian high school the director himself had attended before a four-year spell at film school in Los Angeles. Then came The Brothers Bloom, a globetrotting caper with notes of Preston Sturges, and – five years before The Last Jedi landed – Looper, a time-travel thriller short on action and long on existential angst.
Though set in the present – unlike almost every whodunit made since the Seventies – Knives Out wears its vintage credentials with pride. Even its poster boasts the same bladelike lettering that first enticed Johnson to Christie all those years ago. It also features a formidable ensemble cast led by James Bond star Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc, a deep-south “gentleman sleuth” pressed into service after the celebrated crime writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), is found murdered at his country estate.
Blanc is close to the anti-007: tweedy of dress and fruity of accent, with an approach to interrogation that recalls a kitten swatting around a toy mouse. (The chief suspects are the next generation of the Thrombey clan, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Chris Evans, Michael Shannon and Toni Colette, all of whom are in line for a cut of a sizeable inheritance.)
It was Craig’s rarely tapped talent for comedy that made Johnson think of him for Blanc. “Daniel’s a goofball,” he laughs. “He’s a seriously funny dude. And I had a sense that after 10-plus years of Bond, he was ready to have fun with this.”
With Craig in position, the rest of the ensemble was assembled at speed – actors Johnson felt could play eccentric “while keeping one foot on the ground”, in order to replicate the wry tone of Christie.
“Even in the golden age of detective fiction, the Twenties and the Thirties, it was crazy how quickly the genre became selfaware, and turned cheeky and meta,” he says. (In Christie’s 1929 short story collection Partners in Crime, she sent up the literary styles and MOs of various forerunners, including GK Chesterton and Arthur Conan Doyle.) That’s why Peter Ustinov remains his favourite Poirot over Albert Finney, David Suchet and the others. “He put a playfulness and clownishness into the character that’s vital to what I always thought made him tick.”
But the genre also aligned with a subject Johnson had been itching to tackle for years. “I had been interested for a long time in this idea of privilege, and the way people go to great pains either to justify their own, or pretend it doesn’t exist,” he says. “There’s a basic human impulse to tell ourselves we earned our place in the castle, rather than being born into it.”
Think of Knives Out’s suspects, then, as bourgeois America in miniature: a gaggle of cosseted baby boomers and their selfobsessed offspring, squabbling over a fortune none of them had the wit to earn for themselves.
Johnson describes the family as existing “on the cusp of caricature” – much like Christie’s own larger-than-life supporting players, who all sprung from archetypes that would have been familiar to her contemporary readers. In place of colonels and governesses, the Thrombey clan includes a vapid lifestyle guru, an arrogant playboy, an uber-woke social justice activist… and a perpetually online teenage alt-right troll.
Ah yes: those. In the two years since the release of The Last Jedi,a determined band of backlashers have been waging an online guerrilla war against Johnson’s film, in response to its progressive outlook (more non-white and female leads) and willingness to variously subvert and ignore fans’ expectations of the franchise.
Johnson agrees he had “a big dose of it”. Did the vitriol become bad enough for him to worry his own safety was at risk? “Oh, no,” he says. “Because people are not the way they are online in real life.”
Even so, the reaction initially took him aback. “With Star Wars, there’s such a big drumroll to the curtain going up, but nobody sees it before the premiere,” he explains. “With a group of maybe two dozen people, you’ve made the
‘You make a Star Wars film in a foxhole. Then suddenly billions of people are seeing it’
There are times when life can seem like a never-ending struggle. Jaan Kaplinski’s metaphor in this poem, of a ball that must be kept aloft, is exactly right: the minute one problem is solved – or, more likely, postponed – the next is nearing crisis point. Domesticity is a hydra: cut off one head and three more bloom, havoc dripping from their fangs. It can be hard to imagine a true rest, free of fretting over doors that stick and roofs that leak.
It is at this point, when we are overwhelmed enough to think we may expire, that we must follow Kaplinski and look out of the window. It is at this point that we must take in the spring, or the autumn, or the winter, each one of them magnificent in its own way, and contemplate the sheer scope of the view, of what lies beyond our little bubble of controlled chaos. Precisely because there is too much to keep in mind, we must take the time to notice how small we really are, and how little our struggles matter when we compare them to the falling dew, the birdsong and the never-ending sky.
There is something blessedly simple about this. No need to go anywhere, no need to change anything. For once, here is a thing that is not in need of fixing: it simply is. And it offers us the thing we need most desperately when life becomes a failed juggling trick: perspective. Our problems are still there – of course they are – but they are dwarfed by the landscape, by the life continuing in every corner of it. And, if we are humble enough to let it, that perspective can change our attitude entirely. Suddenly, a life full of challenges is a life full of possibilities. William Sieghart
The washing never gets done.
The furnace never gets heated.
Books never get read.
Life is never completed.
Life is like a ball which one must continually catch and hit so it won’t
fall.
When the fence is repaired at one end, it collapses on the other. The
roof leaks, the kitchen door won’t close, there are cracks in the foundation, the torn knees of children’s pants…
One can’t keep everything in mind. The wonder is that beside all this one can notice the spring which is so full of everything continuing in all directions – into the evening clouds, into the redwing’s song and into every drop of dew on every blade of grass in the meadow, as far as the eye can see, into the dusk.
The Poetry Pharmacy Returns is published by Particular (£12.99)