Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (3/5 Stars)

 

I had the pleasure of watching writer/director Rian Johnson’s first Knives Out mystery, appropriately entitled Knives Out, when it came out in late 2019. (This movie has nothing to do with knives per se, but the marketers perhaps wisely avoided the subtitle “A Benoit Blanc Mystery”). I wrote a review about it, which having read again, I believe holds up.

I can build upon and elaborate on the effectiveness of murder mystery tropes here. There is a moment in the original Knives Out which proves its status as a top-notch murder mystery. Like a lot of the stories in the locked room mystery genre, at the climax the Detective gathers all the suspects in the same room, reveals the killer, and explains how he figured it out. In Knives Out, I posit that one could pause the movie at that moment, rewatch the first 3/4’s of it again, think really hard about it, and actually come to the same conclusion as the detective. For that reason, even though the explanation was complicated, it didn’t come out of nowhere, and an astute observer would be rewarded for paying close attention for the first hour and a half.

The problem with Glass Onion is that when Detective Benoit reveals the killer and propounds his theory, I believe no audience member could possibly predict the killer no matter how many times they watched the beginning (at least with the reasoning given by Benoit). Why? Because Rian Johnson breaks his own Knives Out rules as to point of view and narrative.

I won’t give much away by explaining what I mean. In “Knives Out” the main characters are the maid (Ana De Armas) and Benoit. Their point of view are stand-ins for the audience. At no point, do those characters know or witness something that the audience also does not witness. There are no scenes left out that these characters are not sharing with us. This is not the case in “Glass Onion”. In both movies, we are introduced to Benoit Blanc showing up at an event not knowing who invited him. In “Knives Out”, Benoit didn’t know who had hired him and had no agenda. In “Glass Onion”, Benoit knew who had hired him and had an agenda the entire time. The movie keeps this detail from the audience until the climatic reveal.

The ultimate effect is a sense of deflation when one realizes that they have been tricked by a movie that was not as clever as it seemed. Now this, in and of itself, seems to be a theme here. A Glass Onion is apparently a metaphor for things that appear complicated, but are in fact, pretty stupid. Here, the murder and murderer is staring everyone plain in the face. This is true. The suspects involved, a politician (Kathryn Hahn), a scientist (Leslie Odum Jr.), a fashion influencer (Kate Hudson), a Twitch Star (Dave Bautista) have been summoned to the island of the Tech CEO/Genius Miles Bron (a la Elon Musk?) played by Edward Norton. On the surface, they appear to be successful and interesting people, but it turns out they are vapid and rather silly.

Then there is our hero. In Knives Out, this was the maid who physically could not tell a lie without throwing up. Here, it is Andi Brand (played by Janelle Monae) whose back story is that she was the real brains behind the tech genius’s success and got screwed out of the company in a recent court case. Dare I say it, the maid’s character even with her rare physical disorder made more sense. The problem here is that the explanation for why Andi Brand is the real genius is kind of dumb. We are told that the court case all hinges on an algorithm that she wrote on a cocktail napkin in a bar several years ago. The movie would have us believe that the information on this cocktail napkin is all it took to create a stupidly successful billion dollar tech business and that she could be frozen out of this business if she couldn’t prove that she wrote what was on that napkin. The actual tech on the napkin, (or for that matter what Alpha, the tech business, actually does) is never explained (because how could it be without sounding ridiculous), but given what I know about court cases, and the little I know about intellectual property, it all sounds pretty stupid. A more effective reason for trusting Andi Brand over Miles Bron, and maybe what the movie was relying on, is the modern audience’s inclination for believing that a white man has taken all the credit for a black woman’s work.

As Benoit explains with annoyed incredulity at the end, the murder and the murderer were really stupid and it was merely the inclination that we have as audience members to expect a more complicated mystery. Sure, I guess, but couldn’t this all just be a convenient excuse for writing a lazy and stupid murder mystery. After all, if the characters and the mystery are stupid, well, ahem, isn’t that because Rian Johnson wrote them that way?

The Banshees of Inishiren (4/5 Stars)

Inishiren is an island off the coast of Ireland. This movie, the latest by writer/director Martin McDonagh (In Bruges, Three Billboard’s Outside Ebbing Missouri) takes place on Inishiren in 1923. Apparently, at that time there was a civil war on the mainland. The characters can hear and see distant explosions off across the channel in the distance. But no one on the island seems to know what the fighting is about nor do they have an opinion as to how it should end. Its just this bad thing that exists in the world and nobody can do much of anything about it.

The location of Inisherin is as much a character in this story as any of the humans inhabiting it. It is exceedingly small, holds perhaps hundreds(?) of people, mostly farmers and herders, and everybody seems to know everybody else and their business. Indeed, they would have to because there is only one church, one post office, and one bar in the whole place. The bar is called the pub, short for public house. You don’t need a brand when you’re the only place in town.

This isolation and poverty makes what would be a trifling event into a very big deal. You see Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson) does not want to be friends with Padraic Suilleabhain (Colin Farrell) anymore. He doesn’t want to drink pints with him. He doesn’t want to sit next to him. Indeed, he makes it clear that he never wants to speak with Padraic ever again. Padraic, much hurt, asks Colm why. After all, they were very good friends and Padraic does not recall ever saying or doing anything wrong. It is not anything you said or did to me, Colm explains, its just that life is short, he has things to do (or at least he feels that he should) and Padraic is dull. In other words, Colm feels that Padraic is wasting his time, time better spent working on composing music (he plays a mean fiddle) than listening to Padraic talk about his donkey. This would be a mean thing to say and do in any town, and in any other town it may just stop there. Maybe Colm and/or Padraic would just start hanging out in different pubs. But in Inisherin, there is only one pub, and its 1923, so there is absolutely nothing else to do in the evenings than drink in this one pub and stew about this cold breakdown in a long standing friendship.

Martin McDonagh is best known for employing cruel wit with low born characters, many of them criminals. As an example, in In Bruges, the first time Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell were teamed up in a McDonagh movie, Gleeson’s character was tasked with an honor killing of Colin Farrell but changes his mind at the last moment in order stop the Colin Farrell character from committing suicide. That’s the type of irony that appeals to Mr. McDonagh black sense of humor, and it works more often than not in his plays and movies (A Behanding in Spokane, yes, Seven Psychopaths, not as much.) Interestingly, Banshees is one of McDonagh’s least funny movies and that probably is a good move. Cruel humor would be out of place here given that all of the characters are basically good and some of them faultless. When bad things start to develop, it is appropriate that McDonagh does not try for the types of laughs he usually goes for. This keeps the story engaging as opposed to off-putting. There are only so many ways this can turn out given the constraints of the location and it remains fresh up to the end.

What drives the material home is the performances by Gleeson and Farrell. Gleeson has always been an interesting actor. He has the type of looks that generally would deprive an actor of a starring role in anything but interesting movies. Over time he has become one of those beloved actors that can just show up in a mainstream flick like an old friend and liven up the joint (have you seen Paddington 2?). It is Colin Farrell that is more of a revelation. Here is a man that has the looks of a leading man and if he wanted to, could remain a boring hot shot indefinitely. Instead, he has become a favorite of movie buff’s for his great acting against type. You wouldn't know to look at him but Colin Farrell is at his best playing losers (In Bruges, The Lobster, True Detective). I tell you, he is exceptionally good at it. His character is Banshees is a boring dolt. It’s another fantastic performance.

It can also be noted that the movie is particularly adept at capturing the language of 1920’s Ireland. I have no idea whether the dialect is accurate, but can attest that it is much different way of speaking than you may hear today. At the least, if you see this movie, you’ll finally have an idea of how to pronounce the name Siobhan.