THE ‘PUZZLE’ OF THE SECRET GENIUS
“Puzzle” belongs to a category of movie that deserves some attention: the secret genius movie.
This invariably is the story of someone living a somewhat disappointing life, but not a horrible life by any means, who finds out that he or she is a mathematician of dazzling dimension, or a chess master in waiting or, in the case of “Puzzle,” a puzzle assembler of world-class speed.
The hallmark of these movies is that they show, in the beginning, the hero or heroine being treated, not in a bad way, but in a way that doesn’t acknowledge or consider the possibility of genius. And it’s understood that the audience is supposed to react with a sense of injustice, not at the spectacle of a nice, average person being disrespected, but that a genius is not being given proper deference.
This leads us to the realization of what these movies are really about. They are fantasies in which we, through the surrogate of the lead character, get our due. After all, people always believe they deserve better, and everyone knows — not just feels, but knows
— that they have hidden gems of ability or spirit. In secret genius movies, these gems are revealed as too big to be contained forever. They’re so big, in fact, that everyone else’s life must be configured around them.
And so, in “Puzzle,” we meet Agnes (Kelly Macdonald), a wife and mother of two boys, both college age. The youngest son is the prince of the family — and doesn’t deserve to be. Meanwhile, the sensitive older son has been commandeered into the family business, working in dad’s auto garage. The father (David Denman), meanwhile, isn’t a bad guy, exactly. He snores, but he can’t help that. He also can’t seem to see Agnes as a person with any capacity for selfhood.
Related to that is the husband’s idea — something beyond an idea and more like a governing assumption — that life dreams are evidence of self-indulgence and delusion, and that resigning oneself to lifelong, low-grade unhappiness is a form of virtuous pragmatism. Dreams are not allowed. Likewise, Agnes knows better than to tell her husband that she has answered an advertisement for a puzzle partner and that she is preparing to enter a puzzle contest.
“Puzzle” is about what happens when a woman realizes she is locked into a marriage that depends, almost foundationally, on her never answering a need, never having a desire and never growing. Marriages develop invisible rules, and in “Puzzle,” Agnes comes up against them, feels their contours and chooses to break them. As such, Agnes herself is a kind of a puzzle herself — meek, soft-spoken, shy, easily underestimated, yet with some strong, dormant sense of self that gradually awakens.
Irffan Khan, a Pakistani pop star, plays the puzzle partner, a Manhattan inventor who sees what the audience is tempted to regard as the essential Agnes, but she really is a wife and really is a mother, too. Macdonald brings all those sides together, creating an enigmatic portrait of someone not quite knowable but real.
The only problem with the movie is that, by the end, one gets the impression that director Marc Turtletaub and the screenwriters were under the impression that Agnes’ main problem was the one within her marriage, rather than the overarching issue of a lack of personal fulfillment.
In any case, “Puzzle” ends strangely. It’s not clear what the filmmakers intended or how they think we’re supposed to feel about it. It’s entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional.