Did you read the profile of Benoit Blanc, “The Last of the Gentleman Sleuths,” in this magazine? If so, congratulations. It takes a reader of rare perspicacity and breadth to enjoy an article that does not exist. Or, rather, it does exist, but only in the imagination of Rian Johnson, the writer and director of “Knives Out.” In this, his latest film, we actually see a copy of The New Yorker, turned to the page on which the profile begins. Whether fictional fact checkers were required to assess the validity of facts that were, in fact, fiction, you will never know.
Benoit Blanc looks real enough. He wears a lot of tweed. He smokes cigars as long as fountain pens. His accent hails from the Deep South—so deep, indeed, that he may well have donned it for the occasion, like a velvet waistcoat. And he is played by Daniel Craig, who seems mightily relieved, as ever, to be slipping through the bars of Bond.
Blanc is asked to investigate a death. He is unsure who hired him, for he received nothing but an envelope of cash. The death itself, to all appearances, is unambiguous, although, as any fan of murder mysteries will tell you, the purpose of appearances is to confound. The deceased is Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), who, by a tasty irony, happens to have written murder mysteries—eighty million copies of which have sold, in thirty languages. On the morning after his eighty-fifth-birthday party, he is found with his throat cut, a dagger by his side: the very definition of red-handed. Suicide, then. Is it possible, nonetheless, that foul play might have been involved? Or just play? Typical of Harlan, to bequeath a beautiful riddle.
The party was attended by most, though not all, of his loved ones, who are about as lovable as the flu. Meet Walt (Michael Shannon), Harlan’s son, who runs the publishing empire that has sprung from Harlan’s books. Or Walt’s sister, Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis), who shares her father’s penchant for puzzles but lacks his warmth; she sounds snappy from first to last, although being married to the bumptious Richard (Don Johnson) would give anyone cause to snap. Their son, Ransom (Chris Evans), can’t make the birthday, or even the funeral, but compensates by rolling up later, in his classic BMW, to annoy the hell out of everyone. And don’t forget Joni (Toni Collette), the wife of Harlan’s late son, who runs a company that “promotes a total life style” and has the free-flowing dresses to prove it.
The youngest generation includes Joni’s daughter, Meg (Katherine Langford), who, thanks to Harlan’s generosity, is at Smith, and Walt’s teen-age son, Jacob (Jaeden Martell), who is described by his father as “very political”; Blanc, having made Jacob’s acquaintance, refers to him more accurately as “the Nazi child masturbatin’ in the bathroom.” Last, and very much least, in the opinion of the surviving Thrombeys, is Marta (Ana de Armas), Harlan’s nurse, who is distraught at his passing—more so than his relatives, whose grief is assuaged by the fortune that they hunger to inherit. All of them, even Ransom, muster for the reading of the will. The stage is set.
If you sat and suffered through Kenneth Branagh’s “Murder on the Orient Express” (2017), allow me to put your mind at rest. “Knives Out” is not based on a book by Agatha Christie. Nor does it properly smack of her, in spite of the domestic setup and the sudden demise. Much of Christie’s unwaning appeal relies on incongruity—maleficence emerging in the most genteel of contexts, like strychnine in the tea—whereas the Thrombeys make no pretense of decency. Even if they are not to blame for the old man’s sanguinary end, you feel confident that they’re guilty of something.
Harlan’s residence, as somebody remarks, recalls a game of Clue. Dark-red brick, tall turrets, and, in the opening shot, two black dogs bounding in slow motion through fallen leaves. And the interior! Firelight flickers off carved wood; a passageway, high up, is entered through a trick window; and the room where Blanc interviews the bereaved has a bearskin on the floor, an antique cannon, and a host of knives arranged in a wheel, like the rays of a homicidal sun. It is as if the production designers, dispatched on a décor-gathering mission, could not contain themselves; the whole place is deliberately stuffed to the seams, like a gothic pastiche, just as the performances are pulpy and close to overripe. “The game’s afoot, eh, Watson?” Blanc exclaims, and unblushingly whips out a magnifying glass to inspect a rug. In short, the film is all too much, as if the director were half mocking the genre that he reveres. While fulfilling the demands of the mystery form—his plot locks into position, with a fiendish and gratifying click—he’s also using it to tell a different sort of tale.
The tenor of that tale is political, and it will be interesting to see how “Knives Out,” sumptuous and diverting as it is, plays in the heartland. Though Donald Trump is not named, he is discussed, in predictably raucous tones, and what matters about Harlan is not merely how he perished but how his kinfolk behave once his influence—clever, mild, and sportive, as you would expect with Plummer in the part—is removed. The answer is that they scrap like rats in a sack. After one relative claims to have built a business “from the ground up,” another retorts that it began with a million-dollar loan from Harlan. (Remind you of anyone?) The Thrombeys don’t even have the encrusted dignity of old money; Blanc, told that he is now in their “ancestral home,” laughs heartily and points out that Harlan bought it from a Pakistani businessman in 1988.
This sardonic approach is not without risks, and the movie’s polished surface, to my eye, bears a sheen of smugness. Regardless of the whodunnit, we are left in no doubt as to where true villainy lies, and the title might as well have been “Wealth Kills.” What rescues the film, rooting it in moral honesty, is the presence of Marta. The Thrombeys, needless to say, can’t be bothered to learn her country of origin; one says Uruguay, another Paraguay, and so on. She’s foreign, and that’s enough. What none of them are equipped to realize is that she’s good, and that her goodness—which Blanc, being a detective, suspects from the start—will help him crack the case. Virtue is never easy to depict, but Ana de Armas does a touching and plausible job, glancing nicely off Craig, and I look forward to seeing them both again soon for the next 007 adventure, in which de Armas takes a major role. Will it allow her to mooch around in sweaters, sneakers, and jeans, as she does for most of “Knives Out”? I fear not.
With an election year looming, a dilemma has arisen. What shall we do with the undeserving rich? Tax ’em to the hilt? Or give ’em a tax break, to cushion the agony of affluence? “Knives Out” leaves them bamboozled and marooned, but, if that response strikes you as insufficiently robust, I recommend “Kind Hearts and Coronets.” Robert Hamer’s merciless masterpiece of 1949, set in Edwardian England, and screening in a new print at Film Forum, is nothing if not pragmatic. The cure for inequality, according to this film, is serial assassination.
Dennis Price plays Louis Mazzini, whose beloved mother, having married beneath her, was cast aside by the noble clan to which she had the honor to belong. After she dies, Louis decides to hallow her memory by sidling back into the family and becoming the Duke of Chalfont: a simple task, slightly impeded by those tiresome souls whose claim is more immediate than his—or, as he calls them, “monsters of arrogance and cruelty, whose only function in the world was to deprive me of my birthright.” Working through the list, and slaying them one by one, will not be a problem. Why should it be? What counts is the manner of slaughter, and—this being the most courteous of films—the vital importance of never mislaying one’s cool. Also, not a droplet of blood must be shown. That would be intolerably vulgar.
The movie is famed for many reasons, eight of them being the characters played by Alec Guinness. Think of the Cheshire Cat leaving eight separate smiles in the air. Given that Hamer was gay and alcoholic—not the most comfortable of compounds, in postwar Britain—it is, perhaps, little surprise that “Kind Hearts and Coronets” should have endured as the locus classicus of subterfuge, deceit, and the charm of the unspoken. I regard it as the best Oscar Wilde film ever made, despite its not being adapted from Wilde. Drownings, explosions, and poisonings, their ethical status barely mentioned, let alone chastised, roll by like carriages in the park. The comedy is as black as widow’s weeds. Artfulness is all.
If you are unfamiliar with “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” the question is not whether making the trip to Film Forum to see it is worth your while. The question is how stiff a penalty should be levied upon you by the City of New York should you fail to do so. My personal view is that a brief prison sentence would not be too harsh. There really is no excuse. ♦