Knives Out

So by my workings, this is Rian Johnson's fifth feature and his career would look explicable were it not for the lumping great behemoth of his fourth film. Brick in 2005 - low budget, clever reworking of hard-boiled detective fiction. The Brothers Bloom in 2008 - appreciably higher budget, more well-known actors but still quirky and indy. Looper in 2012 - interesting time travel sci-fi with Bruce Willis. So far, nice little trajectory. But wait, what's this? A FLECKING STAR WARS FILM!?! Fast forward a couple of years while the online invective wears off and here we are at Knives Out, which is, for me, his best film yet.

On the face of it, this is a murder mystery 'whodunit', set mostly in a lovely old country home. The quaintness goes a little further with Daniel Craig's Benoit Blanc, a southern US detective with an eloquent turn of phrase. But underneath, Knives Out is a scathing attack on the 'haves' of society and what they'll do to keep their pound of flesh. These 'haves' are manifested by the Thrombeys, who are gathered at the old house to see off the departed patriarch of the family, grotesquely rich Harlan Thrombey, played in flash-back by Christopher Plummer. The performances of the family members are fantastic - Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Michael Shannon, Chris Evans and Toni Collette all arguably handing in their best performances. And their characters are quite well balanced too. There are conservative elitists and liberal elitists but, make no mistake, they are all cunts. When their way of life is threatened by an 'other', very much a 'have not', their true colours come to the fore. The 'have not' here is played by Ana de Armas, last seen in Blade Runner 2049, and a very different role it is. She plays Harlan's nurse from Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil or possibly somewhere else. It's a running theme that none of the family members actually know which country she's from. The film credits Craig and Evans first but it's de Armas's film. The story revolves around her and she carries it off with reserved ease.

While the acting is top notch, I reckon it's the script that is the star of Knives Out. The overarching storyline is complex enough to make you wonder if everything scans but satisfying enough to shrug off the improbabilities of it all. Johnson fills the narrative with neat tricks (the dogs as a Deus Ex Machina) and pay-offs (the baseball is almost a character in itself). The dialogue is littered with gems. Don Johnson's character assumes that his nephew has been "joylessly masturbating to pictures of dead deer". Blanc muses about "..the terminus of Gravity's Rainbow" (referring to a famously inaccessible Thomas Pynchon novel). And virtually everything Toni Collette says is annoyingly brilliant.

The credits provided some eyebrow raises. It seems Joseph Gordon-Levitt was an off camera voice at the beginning of the film, meaning he's been in all of Johnson's films so far. Frank Oz also made an appearance - he was the will reader. Not too often you get James Bond, Captain America, Detective Sonny Crockett AND Yoda in the same film.

See also:

Johnson's, Brick (2005) is an assured debut feature and have a look at Robert Altman's Gosford Park (2001) for more class-based mystery.

POD TO FOLLOW.....??