Films like this… intimidate me. As someone who writes about
every new movie I watch, I certainly don’t make it a habit of hiding my true
feelings in regards to pretty much anything I’ve written about here, whether I
love it, hate it, or walked away unfathomably bored. But my come-up as part of
the wider YouTube angry critic scene has definitely influenced how I approach
all of those features. If something is bad, I hold no qualms in outlying every
single way it has failed… but what about the opposite? What about those films
that are just so engaging, so well-crafted, so endearingly good?
Surely, a film that is entirely positive is an impossible
thing; no film is perfect, and even with films I love, I usually bring up even
the most minor of issues to keep things balanced. Then there comes a film like
Knives Out where, no matter how hard I strain my grey matter, I struggle to
find fault in what it presents. I don’t know if this film is indeed perfect,
but holy shit, it's so damn close that there's nary a difference.
Let’s start with its main conceit, as a tribute and
well-meaning rib-nudging of the classic murder mystery. Maybe it’s because I
sat through the raw laziness of Murder Mystery earlier this year, but the way
Rian Johnson constructs this mystery absolutely astounds me. Every bit of
character development, every plot revelation, every spiral-form twist in the
narrative; all of it not only shows an incredible level of attention to
detail to make it all fit, it even pulls the Edgar Wright trick of outright
telling the audience what’s going on, but in a way that goes unnoticed until
the whole thing is revealed. The namedrop of Wright’s Baby Driver in the film
proper makes a bit more sense with that in mind, as this seriously does measure
up to the man’s uncanny storytelling skills.
Then there’s the ensemble cast, and even considering the
Disney-helmed prevalence of those over the last several years, this is easily
one of the most impressive I think I’ve ever covered on here. Every
performance is memorable, whether it’s Daniel Craig pulling off another American accent that rationally shouldn’t work but somehow does, or Jaeden
Martell as the embodiment of the crap writer/director Rian Johnson went through
(and is still going through) with the backlash to The Last Jedi. While most of them are very pointed in their characterisation, nothing feels
like caricature. Not even Craig as the resident detective, whose dialogue is
full of so much true ingenious writing and pure purple nonsense in such equal
amounts that he makes for one of the most brilliant parts of a film already
bursting at the seams with them.
Did I mention this is also funny as all hell? Like, it’s not
even just the high hit-to-miss ratio on the one-liners, or the delivery, or
even how it balances nicely with the more intense moments. This is the kind of
wit I haven’t seen since the Clue movie, which given its shared aloof tone in
regards to the main mystery must have been a reference point along with
all the Agatha Christie nods. This is likely the most I’ve giggled at a single
movie all year, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t earn every single chuckle it
got out of me.
But the best is yet to come. I mentioned Martell’s alt-right
Internet troll before, and while it definitely shows the real-world influence
for his presence rather prominently, I can’t even fault it for how obvious it
is. Mainly, because even that is only part of a bigger picture, that
being how this film deals with racism and the current American debate
concerning immigration. To that end, it taps into one of the bigger clichés of
the traditional murder mystery (the prevalence of motives for every one of the
main suspects, usually to do with wealth or some other monetary gain), puts it
against the background for Ana de Armas’ Marta (and yes, even the phonetics of
this film are insanely planned-out; that’s how crazy the writing here is) as an
immigrant and nurse for the deceased, and holds up the seemingly-basic virtue
of caring for people other than one’s self like a beacon over everything that
happens in-film.
The Thrombeys, namely the direct or married-in children of Christopher Plummer’s patriarch, frequently make a big deal out of being
‘self-made’. They all wanted a piece of the American Dream, and ostensibly,
they got it… from their father. But as soon as he decides that maybe they
should actually become self-made and begin their own enterprises, that’s
when the knives truly come out. It adds to the recurring references to white
nationalism, which manifest differently depending on the generation of the
family, and makes a remarkably astute observation in regards to the ‘dey terk err
jerbs’ refrain.
Maybe, because of their come-up and earnest want for that
Dream for themselves and those they came with, they’re willing to get it not
through back-stabbing and bickering, but through just being good at what they
do and who they are. It both refutes the fantasy of the Dream while also
tweaking it to show what it really looks like in the modern era; as someone who
grew tired of American Dream critiques years ago, I am quite floored at how
well that tightrope-walk turned out.
I genuinely wasn’t expecting much from this. As much as I
liked Looper and even The Last Jedi, I definitely walked away from both of them
with certain gripes or just general disinterest at parts of their construction.
None of that exists here. I walked into this not thinking that I’d see an easy
contender for the best film of 2019, and yet here I am, writing this review and
hoping desperately that all of this doesn’t sound too good to be true. If I can
convince you to watch only one movie from this year, based on my own
recommendation, make it this one.
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