The first ten-or-so minutes of Rian Johnson’s ingenious new whodunit “Knives Out” get right down to business. Johnson’s script briskly and efficiently introduces the major players in a murder investigation most foul, then assigns them each a plausible motive for the killing of mystery novelist Harlan Thrombrey (Christopher Plummer). His family tree has rot at the roots; it’s in his hot-tempered eldest daughter (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her feckless husband (Don Johnson). It’s in his daughter-in-law (Toni Collette) via a deceased Thrombrey son, now living off Harlan’s generosity as she manages a Goop stand-in. It’s in his youngest son Walt (Michael Shannon), the longtime manager of the publishing house that cranks out the mystery paperbacks on which their palatial estate in western Massachusetts has been built. And it’s most present in his grandson Ransom (Chris Evans, shaking off the Marvel barnacles), a dedicated asshole who skips the funeral yet shows up early for the unveiling of the will.
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As he previously uttered in David Fincher’s adaptation of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” Plummer regards these people as “thieves, misers, bullies, the most detestable collection of people you will ever meet.” And just as in that film, Daniel Craig, a detective, soon arrives on the scene to ferret out the truth, this time in the guise of molasses-voiced gumshoe Benoit Blanc. So the game board has been set for a devilishly clever mystery that reconfigures itself approximately every ten minutes, until the film has expanded in purpose to encompass a grand statement about America and our current moment. That’s vague praise, but if there was ever a film bettered by a complete lack of knowledge going in, it’s this thicket of plot twists and revelatory flashbacks. For once, the frothy-mouthed spoiler paranoia taking over the moviegoing culture might be justified.
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The last piece of the puzzle is Marta (Ana de Armas, better than she’s ever been), Harlan’s South American nurse and closest confidante. The Thrombrey clan loves her like she’s part of the family, or so they love to vocally insist, until it’s time to trot the girl out as a prop in their drunken political squabbles. She comes to join Benoit as an unofficial co-investigator, useful for her peculiar condition of compulsively vomiting whenever she’s made to fib, a built-in lie detector that’s just one of many inspired visual gags. More importantly, she’s the point where the rubber of the family’s self-congratulatory liberal politics meets the road of their atrocious, hypocritical real-life behavior. Don Johnson’s character never seems more contemptible or real than when he goes from quoting the “Hamilton” line about immigrants getting the job done to describing actual immigrants in criminal terms a couple scenes later.
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The nod to the Broadway sensation, a paean to national values enjoyed exclusively by the wealthiest people in New York, has been subtly freighted with meaning that an American in the year 2019 can infer. Johnson’s writing truly shines in moments like this, where referential minutiae quietly speak volumes of characterization. As Harlan’s other grandson (Jaeden Martel) and granddaughter (Katherine Langford) argue, they do so in the vernacular of the extremely online, lobbing insults like “liberal snowflake” and “alt-right troll.” This film has been palpably informed by the amount of time that Johnson spends on Twitter, and in no small way, it doubles as a bracing fuck-you to the sort of cretins that have been harassing him ever since he went to the galaxy far, far away.
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Though the objects of his contempt number greater than that, as the film takes on anyone with a sense of entitlement about their place in a country allegedly dedicated to self-starter-ism. Harlan’s untimely demise and an unusual alteration to his will complicate the inheritance of his vast fortune, and it’s then that these genteel people reveal their ugliest, most honest selves. Everyone knows rich people have weak moral fiber, but Johnson sees how that weakness comes from fear, which comes from the knowledge of how precarious their station in life really is. Easy come, easy go, and money never comes easier than when nothing more than being born makes you a multi-millionaire.
There’s so much to love about Johnson’s triumph, both as gratuitously enjoyable entertainment and the first film to take on the significance of a President Trump without lapsing into corny preachiness, and so little of it can be discussed here. Just suffice it to say that the genre maestro has his audience in good hands, “good” in this instance meaning both “skilled, capable, expert” and “decent, ethically sound.” He’s assembled a dazzling contraption that, if twisted in just the right way, pops open to reveal a nugget of wisdom crystallized by the cathartic final shot: we only really own what we earn. [A]
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