Movie: Knives Out (2019)

Spoiler Alert : I cannot review this without giving some of the twists away, so if you hate spoilers, please stop reading now (or at the end of the next paragraph)

 There is no dearth of stars here – You have Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Christopher Plummer…. 

It is rare to see a pure murder mystery (in the style of the Agatha Christie’s stories) these days. In addition, this has the quirky comedy running right through it, with a little narrative style vaguely reminiscent of Malcolm In The Middle.

 

On the whole it makes for an entertaining mix. In addition to all of these, you have multiple surprises along the way. For instance, who would have imagined Chris Evans, that wholesome clean cut American hero, in not only the role of a good for nothing man but an evil one?

 

The surprise is compounded by encountering our James Bond, Daniel Craig, in the cerebral role of a detective Benoit Blanc (a la Hercule Poirot) and with a weird accent (not French, to my ears at least, as would be suggested by his name – nor Belgian French.

 

Some of the ‘detections’ are weird. Some of the actions of the people involved are very weird. But for all that, it is entertaining.

 

The movie starts with Harlan Thrombey, a famous author of crime (ironic, that!) novels calls his entire family to his mansion. The beginning scene shows the housekeeper Fran going upstairs with a polished tea set and finding him dead in his room. Christopher Plummer (remember his heydays in The Sound of Music?) does a credible job of a cantankerous old man who deliberately sets out to rub everyone the wrong way.

 

Benoit turns up there, almost uninvited, and starts kibbutzing in the police investigation but soon takes over the entire investigation. He reveals that he was hired anonymously through a letter which contained his retainer in cash and professes ignorance on who would have hired him.

 

Anyway, it turns out that the entire house had a motive in getting rid of him. His daughter was stealing money from him by getting him to send duplicate cheques for her daughter’s boarding school; Harlan threatened to cut off all allowances. His son in law, Richard, was cheating on his wife – Harlan’s daughter – and Harlan threatened to expose his perfidy to his daughter. Another son, who was his publisher was fired right in that party by Harlan and his livelihood threatened with ruin.

 

Not enough? Ransom, the grandson (played by Chris Evans) was told that Harlan had already cut him totally off in his will.

 

All the family seemed to have mooched off the wealth of the old man and so all of them were upset the night before Harlan’s death. A good set up on who did it, right? Albeit totally old fashioned.

 

The only persons who seem to be totally unperturbed by all this is an old lady who seems to not realize anything that is going on around her, and Marta, the caretaker of Harlan – she is a young lady of whom Harlan seems to be very fond of.

 

There is this absurd characteristic of Martha – like Pinoccio, who cannot lie without his nose growing longer, she cannot lie without throwing up. (Really?)

 

But unlike the Agatha Christie mysteries which this superficially resembles, we learn the cause of death through a memory of Marta. The previous night, Marta had taken tea to Harlan. They play Go and Harlan overturns the board (as he was losing), upsetting Marta and in her haste and confusion, she gives him an injection – instead of the regular dose, she manages to inject him with 100 ml of morphine, which is fatal to anyone, let alone a weak, feeble man like Harlan.

 

Harlan wants to help his murderess, and aks her to escape. His plan is for her to drive away in her car taking care to be observed, and then return through the trellis in the balcony. She then should wear Harlan’s coat and make herself visible, establishing her alibi. When she hesitates, he forces her hand by slitting his own throat. She complies. Then leaves the same stealthy way she came.

 

Problem solved, right? The movie should be over in about half an hour right? No, the story is only getting started.

 

Her interrogation with Blanc goes well, even though she has this puking problem because Benoit did not ask her any question, on which she had to lie outright.

 

Meanwhile, Benoit asks her to be her confidant (a la Hastings, another Poirot influenced feature) as she is ‘trustworthy’ and cannot lie. She starts obliterating tiny things which may have pointed to her as the murderer.

 

The next day Harlan’s will is read and in it is a shocker : Harlan has left everything in his will, including the house to Marta!! She is genuinely shocked.

However, the family is upset and luckily there is Ransom, who takes her in his car, away from the angry family. He seems amused by the whole flipside.

 

He takes her to a restaurant and after she eats her full, asks her what happened and how Harlan died. She cannot lie now and she tells him the truth.

 

She is now persuaded by Ransom to seek the truth, even if the police led by Benoit are pursuing her. First they go to the lab to find the toxicology report but find the whole lab burning.

 

Now she receives a note to meet at an unused building. However, when she goes there, she finds Fran, the housekeeper (who originally found Harlan’s body) dying of the same morphine overdose.

 

Marta does not want any more blood on her conscience and she gets Fran to the hospital by calling 911. She decides to confess all to the family and renounce her windfall.

 

However there is an abrupt twist. The problem with that is that they do not tell how Benoit figured it all out. He talks mystically of ‘a doughnut within a doughnut’ but for the life of me cannot figure out what the blather is all about.

 

Not only that; the harsh man Harlan, who is mean to everyone, helps Marta even when he realizes that she poisoned him. He abruptly cuts off everyone. I can go on and on.

 

It has the quirky side that is likable and an absurd side that can drive you nuts.

 

If you have the right attitude, you’d still enjoy the movie.

 

6/10

   – – Krishna

 

Movie: The Insider (1999)

This movie is about Big Tobacco and the manipulations of the mighty tobacco empire to stop the media from exposing its trifling with the Truth in sworn depositions.

But, told from a human angle, the story keeps our interest and the scintillating performances of the main characters adds to the feeling of having watched a good movie. There are no great action sequences or computer generated monsters to terrorize you or show you a different world. But the story displays the ugly underbelly of corporate greed and the buckling of intrepid and powerful media personalities to pressure applied at the right angle and at the right time. It is about idealism in journalism and how it sometimes can come up short against pressures of corporate reality.

The initial scenes are just set there to show the dynamism of the CBS media personalities. Lowel Bergman, the famous producer of CBS (played by Al Pacino) can do almost anything to get the news covered in all its true glory. He works with Mike Wallace (played by Christopher Plummer) who is so powerful that he can browbeat Hizbulla’s leader into submission about how close he should be sitting to the leader in an interview. They are idealistic, fearless, and are powerful even inside CBS, able to overrule corporate honchos normally in the pursuit of the ‘raw truth’.

When Bergman gets hold of unethical practices and subsequent false testimony on the part of some tobacco companies, the real story starts. Bergmen gets hold of Jeffrey Wigand (played by Russell Crow), who has, he suspects, a secret that can tear the corporations apart and change the face of Big Tobacco in the US. But Wigand has been let go with very generous retirement plan just to keep his mouth shut.

Initially Wigand tells him that he will not talk about it. When his company chairman forces him to sign an expanded confidentiality agreement and threatens to remove all his perks, Wigand refuses and later tells Bergman that the CEOs of the tobacco companies perjured themselves in Congress.

When subsequently, his family is threatened by what he believes is his corporation, he decided to tell all.  The tobacco companies get a court order from Kentucky (state order) that prohibits from giving testimony but he is in Mississippi and records the tape, knowing well that he may be arrested if he returned to Kentucky again. Mike Wallace interviews him and he tells the whole story. He finds that the price of standing up to the corporation when his wife, unable to deal with the pressures mounting, decides to leave him.

Bergman is stunned when CBS, and even his idol Wallace decide not to air the tape. He realizes that CBS has been pressured by Tobacco by possible threats of lawsuits into silence and he decides to expose the CBS story by going to a rival publication!

The story is told very well and the understated performance of Crow is in stunning contrast to the idealistic, fire breathing Al Pacino and the cocky, self assured portrait of Wallace by Plummer, who finally comes across as an old man desperately trying to hang on to the perks earned by sacrificing his lifelong ideas of truth and independence is great. The people are shows with all the issues and warts and therefore appear human. Wallace is not a pure as snow whistleblower – he has an anger control problem, he has jilted women in the past etc.

It is interesting to compare the character with the real life Russell Crow and also to see him as a blond man. In addition, the performance of gloomy, slightly confused character reminds one of his later brilliant performance in A Beautiful Mind three years later.

The story is well told and keeps your interest throughout. The dialogs are crisp, the characters true to life, and the story told cleanly. (The movie was based on a  Vanity Fair piece called A Man Who Knew Too Much)

You come away with the feeling of having watched a good movie, one where the story is told intelligently, and is satisfying.

I would say  a 7/10

–          Krishna