Knives Out - 2019
Updated: Sep 22, 2022
There are really two stories being told simultaneously in Knives Out. One is manifest - right in front of our eyes. The other is latent - subtle and rich in subtext. On the surface, Knives Out is a rather fantastically glossy genre exercise, bringing us back to the whodunit's of Marple and Pierot, the witness rattling of Holmes and Watson. The game Clue.
For those who did not yet know it, Rian Johnson is a hell of a director. He knows how to spin a yarn. His films are generally bitingly funny and exquisitely well-cast (The roll call on these credits alone looks like a Who's Who of Hollywood past and present). Plummer as the slain patriarch. Jamie Lee, Don Johnson, Michael Shannon, and Toni Collette as the children, and Daniel Craig as the inspector! My goodness, forget the trailer, I'm in!
And Knives Out does unfold delightfully. There are family interviews and recreated past episodes which morph and change as the cast members alibis become more porous. Its moves swimmingly until we reach the third act, and here is where the film falters for me. I found this portion, when Craig at last brings forth his findings, to be a little TOO overly expository. We don't need twenty minutes for you to tell us who really did it. Just churn out the goods one time in five minutes. We're smart. We'll get it. For a better example of that, I'd actually recommend a film near and dear to my heart: Johnson's FIRST film, Brick.
Oh and that other layer. Well it's a complete takedown of the rich, silly. Perhaps it's a lambasting of Trump's America. The heroine, after all, is an immigrant. Johnson is quite the xenophobe. And Toni Collette's Joni is sooo obviously Gwenyth Paltrow that the whole thing just lands a little too on the nose. On the level of subtext, the whole thing almost screams - How vapid are the rich! But, Knives Out offers surface pleasures for those uninterested in all of its sub-themes. For that, and for the way Rian injects his genre tale with a beating moral conscience (dodging spoilers here), he is deserving of high praise.
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