‘Knives Out’ a cut above the rest
Masterful direction, strong performances enliven clever whodunit
It ’s striking sometimes how fast you can tell that a movie is worth watching and that a director knows what he’s doing. Case in point: “Knives Out.”
We begin with a view of an old mansion, like something you’d see in an adaptation of an Agatha
Christie novel. Then the camera moves inside, and we follow it into rooms and down corridors. The set decoration is notably detailed. It ’s rugs on top of rugs, all expensive. Every where are rich patterns and textures, and odd objects, all of which combine to convey an impression of eccentricity, taste and wealth.
We see a housemaid balancing objects on a tray. She opens the door to a room, and there we see what she sees: Her employer is dead. He is reclining on a couch with his throat slit. Cut to her reaction: She almost drops the tray, but then catches herself — the teapot and cup wobbles, but they don’t fall.
By then I knew “Knives Out” was going to be a good.
Did you catch the decisive clue, that telling detail that any master detective of quality movies would have seized on instantly? It was the maid’s reaction.
A hundred years of feature films have prepared us for the maid to drop the tray. A hundred
years of clichés have told director Rian Johnson that that is the default move for that scene. Yet he resisted, even in a movie like this — a satire of the sort of film in which maids do drop trays. He stayed attentive, found the truth of the moment, and if he found the truth for that moment, I knew he’d keep finding it.
Johnson also wrote the screenplay for “Knives Out,” something you might guess just from watching it. The terms and strategies of plot and storytelling are so specific here that they practically had to be implemented by the person who’d imagined them.
For example, “Knives Out” is a whodunit — sort of — except that, in the first 15 minutes, we know how the killing happened. We see it in f lashback. Oh, yes, and about those f lashbacks: They’re reliable. In another movie, they might have been subjective and designed to confuse. Here they present actual concrete fact, and even then, “Knives Out” is hard to out-guess.
This is a family-gathers-atthe-house-and-one-of-them-isa-murderer storiy — kind of. The movie’s not exactly that, but it borrows from that kind of setup and trades on our familiarity with it. The family patriarch, a best-selling mystery writer (Christopher Plummer), has been found dead, and the police have brought all the possible suspects back to the house for questioning.
These include Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Collette and Michael Shannon as the writer’s children;
Don Johnson as a son-in-law; and Chris Evans as the no-good, hotshot grandson. Also on the scene is Daniel Craig, as the southern master detective Benoit Blanc, and Ana de Armas as Marta, the deceased’s former nurse, who is variously described by the family as being from Uruguay, Paraguay, Ecuador and Brazil.
One of the consistent pleasures of “Knives Out” is that, while its style evokes an earlier era, the script is very much a witty response to today’s world. At one point, Marta — most of the story is presented from her perspective — crosses into the living room, while a vigorous conversation is taking place. The son-in-law (Johnson) says, “Yeah, he’s an a----, but maybe an a--- is what this country needs.” We don’t have to be told who he’s talking about. “Knives Out” comes out the day before Thanksgiving and previews the arguments that will be happening at dinner tables all over America.
For Ana de Armas, who has been around for a decade, this movie is a breakout, and for Daniel Craig, who is quite funny as the detective, “Knives Out” shows there will be lots of life after James Bond. In fact, the entire ensemble is outstanding, including Plummer who, despite showing up dead in the first minutes, gets lots of screen time, in f lashback.
Finally, you have to love a movie that finds a featured role for veteran character actor M. Emmet Walsh (“Blood Simple”) and that actually contains a “Gravity ’s Rainbow” joke. In the case of the latter, someone makes a reference to the Thomas Pynchon novel, and the other says they haven’t read it.
“I haven’t either,” the first person replies. “No one has.”