Teresa Reviews “Knives Out” (2019)

Four stars

Bill and I love movies. We love cheese and crackers and wine (for me), beer (for him), and grapes. We don’t have money to spare and even if we did, I have serious cheapskate tendencies. To meet all these conflicting impulses, we developed a new hobby a few years ago.

We select a movie from the library’s extensive collection, we make an array of fancy cheese and crackers and raw veg (crudités if you’re being fancy) and grapes and settle in for dinner and a show. The fancy cheese comes from the local supermarket fancy cheese case where I search for discounted cheese, marked down because it’s past its expiration date. We’ve never had a problem with the cheese being bad, by the way. No one can expect me to spend $18 a pound for cheese if I can get a different gourmet cheese for $9 a pound. This also allows us to try out all kinds of cheese we’ve never heard of because if the price is right, why not? Crackers go on sale all the time as do fancy grapes. Last night, the night of Knives Out, we had Moon Drop grapes which are delicious and the most peculiar looking grape you’ve ever seen.

We watch a movie every Friday and Saturday evening with our cheese and crackers dinner. I do hand-sewing, repairing and mending and the like so my time is both enjoyable and productive. Because we rely on our library, we’re always behind in current movies. We’re also slowly catching up on all the movies we wanted to watch but never had the chance.

We are also interested in Agatha Christie and movies made from her books or films that are similar in concept to Dame Agatha movies.

Thus, the stars aligned and we arrive at Knives Out, released in 2019. We’re only a year behind the rest of the English-speaking world! Hooray.

This movie is not an adaptation of any of Dame Agatha’s books. Yet the story line resembles her novels in feel and execution. If it were an Agatha Christie adaptation — which it most certainly is not — I’d give it four little knives since sharp edges figure so prominently in the film. The movie was marketed as a return to the great murder mystery films of ye olden days, back when moviegoers expected snappy dialog, little nudity, an absence of the pornography of violence, few explosions, and fewer expletives along with an intricate plot that demanded the audience pay attention and not surf on their smartphones lest a moment pass without maximum stimulation.

Does Knives Out (Amazon link) deliver? You bet it does. I really enjoyed it. Bill not quite as much, but he agreed he would see it again to see how the plot mechanisms work and to watch great actors and actresses chew the scenery with abandon.

In addition, Knives Out hits the mark of English Country House Porn, despite taking place in a mansion in Connecticut or out in the Hamptons. What a house. My word. It was hugely impressive with secret windows and plenty of stairs and vast, sweeping lawns with romping German Shepherds and a lifetime’s worth of creepy collectibles. Our victim, Harlan Thrombey, was a famous and prolific murder mystery novelist and his house represents a lifetime of murderous inclinations and creepy obsessions.

Very few writers ever reach the bank account balance necessary to buy, furnish, and maintain a house like this so you can tell Harlan was extremely successful. With that kind of money floating around, you can guess that money will figure prominently in the crime and indeed it does.

As befitting classic murder mysteries that Dame Agatha wrote, everyone in the family has a motive for wanting the old man to die and all that lovely money get distributed. Interestingly, there are also two servants who do more than drift around in the background dusting the extensive array of creepy collectables. We have a housekeeper (Fran) and a hired, daily nurse (Marta) to take care of Harlan Thrombey. He’s 85, after all. You didn’t think he scrubbed his toilets, did you? Or that his ever-loving and devoted family did either the housework or dedicated nursing?

They do not, as befitting their exalted status as extremely rich and busy people.

Never forget, extremely rich people, no matter what they claim about social justice, privilege, and we’re all in this together do not scrub their own toilets or nurse their elderly relatives. That’s what staff is for.

There’s also the famous private detective, called in by an unknown client who’s sure that murder was committed and wants to ensure justice triumphs. Which it does, but I won’t tell you how.

There were several points that I thought very interesting and want to bring out.

One was the openness of the class divide. The Thrombey family are wealthy (thanks to the hard work and creative talent of patriarch Harlan Thrombey and not their own efforts), liberal to extremely liberal, and want you to know how they are on the right side of history in their liberalness. To that end, they make a point (all of them) of saying how much Marta and Fran are part of the family. Yet Marta — I’m not sure about Fran — does not get invited to the funeral. No one bothers to ask Marta which country her family actually emigrated from. This is no doubt because they do not actually care.

And when the chips are down and their inheritance is at risk, these limousine liberals show their true colors. Their words are cheap and not to be trusted. Their actions show what they genuinely believe.

Supposedly, the director (Rian Johnson) wanted to make a point with the political diatribe the Thrombey family indulge in but I don’t think I got the point Rian Johnson wanted to make. What I saw was exactly what I expected on the part of limousine liberals: mouthing politically correct, fashionable pieties that get thrown out the window the minute they become liabilities. In other words, the blatant hypocrisy of rich elites. Where is their sense of noblesse oblige? The Thrombey family doesn’t adhere to such nonsensical ideals.

The other thing I noticed, very strongly, was how much this film resembled the last Agatha Christie film adaptation we saw: Crooked House.

Rich, talented, controlling patriarch? Check.
Lavish home far beyond the means of ordinary mortals? Check.
Adult children who can’t make it on their own and depend on daddy for money? Check.
Even more useless grandchildren who resent grandpa while grabbing those exorbitant tuition fees? Check.
Outsider detective called in to figure out what’s actually going on? Check.
Piles of money and property in dispute? Check.

The part of Crooked House that’s not in Knives Out is the decades-younger hot second wife, although that part could conceivably be filled by Nurse Marta who is decades younger, hot, and devoted to Harlan Thrombey. The other difference is that Harlan Thrombey is nowhere near the crazy, mean control-freak that Aristide Leonides was. He’s a much nicer person although he does like his little games.

The outsider detective is also quite different. This detective doesn’t know anyone in the Thrombey family and is there only because he was hired to solve the mystery. In those respects, he’s far more like Hercule Poirot if he were from the deep south. It was amusing to watch the very British Daniel Craig try his best to sound like someone from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I admit I wondered why, in this day and age, the enlightened director Rian Johnson didn’t trouble himself to find an actual Louisianan actor. There must be someone out there in Hollywood from Dixie who can act.

Instead, he had Daniel Craig culturally appropriate the mannerisms and speech of someone he was in no way related to. That was very bad of you, Rian Johnson, having someone from one cultural group ape another, quite different cultural group. Or do you suppose that everyone from the deep south are interchangeable clones, so it didn’t matter? How parochial of you.

Otherwise, the actors and actresses all worked for me. They spoke clearly so I wasn’t totally dependent on subtitles. None of them looked like Barbie and Ken clones, meaning I could tell them apart. Chris Evans was particularly good because he was able to stop being Captain America. That must be a real problem for Chris Evans of the square jawline, square shoulders, and square blond hair. He’s so easily typecast. It did take a few minutes and then I stopped looking for his shield.

I’ll also single out Jamie Lee Curtis who portrayed Linda Thrombey, oldest daughter of Harlan. Her snowy white hair was a wonderful change from the typical actress who’s dying her hair to make sure you know she’s still twenty-five no matter what the passage of decades implies. It must have been relaxing to hang out in the Thrombey mansion since it so strongly resembled an English Country House on steroids. For those of you who don’t know, Jamie Lee Curtis is not just Hollywood royalty (she’s the daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh). She’s also married to Christopher Guest, making her The Right Honorable The Lady Haden-Guest. Christopher Guest is of course Lord Haden-Guest. He’s a baron and they probably have a very nice, ancestral English Country House back in England.

I’d bet money neither of the Haden-Guests scrub their own toilets, no matter what they have to say about solidarity with the working class.

But I digress.

Knives Out isn’t Agatha Christie. But if you’ve watched all the adaptations of her books twice over (including the TV series), then give it a shot. If your tastes are similar to mine, you won’t be disappointed. If they make a sequel — likely because of the piles of money this movie made — I’ll watch that too, enjoying Daniel Craig doing his best to sound southern-fried.