Michael Keaton has been acting in movies long enough to know that if you’re making one, as he does for the second time with the proficient neo-noir “Knox Goes Away,” your opening shot needs to say something. His says it all: a tight close-up inventories the personal affects of an unseen figure taking them one by one, heading out the door, then doubling back to grab the watch, filling the audio track with its relentless ticking. The disembodied hand belongs to John Knox, the hitman Keaton plays with a steely stoneface gradually and agonizingly etched with nervous confusion, who’s getting a bit forgetful. And as a neurologist will inform him a couple of scenes later, his time is running out.
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He’s got a bad case of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, though that’s the only kind of case one gets for a condition that progresses like Alzheimer’s at hyperspeed. His occasional difficulty spitting out a word on the tip of his tongue will devolve into a complete mental lapse in only a few weeks, leaving him with precious little time to get his affairs in order. Naturally, that’s right when one big affair appears on his doorstep in the form of Miles (James Marsden, struggling to sell inconsistent characterization), the son Knox hasn’t spoken to in over a decade.
He needs a favor, a big one, and he needs his father’s unique set of skills to get it done. The conspicuous hand of fate, reaching out of the existential crime classics Keaton clearly drew from for this slick minor-key homage, has delivered that rarest opportunity to a man soon to face his final judgment: a second chance to make good. At a shockingly spry 72, Keaton might be mulling over some similar matters of his own, though his film stays too busy with the process to get mired in the maudlin. Knox plays his feelings close to the vest, and “Knox Goes Away” follows his ice-cold example.
After biffing an assignment with his partner that sets the police on his trail, Knox resolves to call it. He goes about seeking closure with the key people in his limited social circle: the Polish sex worker (Pawel Pawlikowski’s favorite Joanna Kulig) he meets for a weekly bang and chat about literature, the ex-wife (Marcia Gay Harden) with whom he shares a dynamic like cooled lava, the one friend (Al Pacino) he trusts to help him compile a plan to straighten out Miles’ situation. He arrives at his father’s quiet, tidy abode, a stammering mess covered in the blood of the thirtysomething that impregnated his sixteen-year-old daughter, and begs for counsel from an old pro in body disposal. So begins a series of urgent errands engrossing in their technical precision; there’s a procedural fascination in watching the brisk efficiency with which Knox captures and transfers an incriminating fingerprint or plants a bloodstain. The boxes on his to-do list could fill an entire arsenal with Chekov’s guns, their significance revealed in satisfying fashion with a sly turn at the denouement.
As a director, Keaton’s got style — of course, he does, just look at how he pulls off his tough-customer shades — but doesn’t always know what to do with it. His is a glumly unappealing Los Angeles of grey interiors, planned communities, and anonymous alleys. Though Keaton conveys the deterioration of Knox’s psychology with diligence as an actor, trying and failing to hide his glances of searching confusion, his narrow facilities as a director can’t keep pace with his performance. Keaton telegraphs the disorienting effect of Knox’s episodes with screamingly literal visual effects, his favorite a shaky overexposed frame looking like a “POV: you’re inside a flashback in an early-aughts horror movie” TikTok. As Knox loses his way in the woods, so does the film, and this incongruous aesthetic trick metastasizes into an overplayed sensory barrage out of joint with the otherwise commendable restraint.
The horrifying reality of Creutzfeldt-Jakob requires no exaggeration, and to Keaton’s credit, he more frequently dares us to sit with Knox as he keeps a stiff upper lip through his mounting helplessness. But the syndrome itself only exacerbates the inevitable terror of aging, with its forced reckonings and specters of remorse. In all his years racking up bodies, he’s only taken the lives of two people who didn’t have it coming, both of which still haunt him. He knows he’s far beyond absolution, but he’s not too late to save a little face after a lifetime of subpar fathering. He’s sturdy yet imperfect, much like the movie around him, and he refuses to forgive himself for his flaws. But between Keaton’s son giving a turn in front of the camera and his mellow low-burn somberness behind, his unyielding stare into the void of the brain has enough going for it that a viewer might just pay that kindness. [B]
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