The devil's in the detail
Southern gentleman and master detective Benoit Blanc is back in Rian Johnson’s WAKE UP DEAD MAN, A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY. Camus is a sucker for a damn fine whodunnit and this one has the added bonus of some great performances from an outstanding cast…
“I have both of those guys inside me. I have both of those halves of me, basically. And to let those two halves talk was what was personal about the movie, I guess. Just meaning that it’s not important to me because I had a message to get across, God forbid. But that it’s a topic I really care about and I wanted to do a movie that was both an entertainment, but took the topic seriously.”
Writer/Director, Rian Johnson on his two leading characters1
Some actors effortlessly exude charisma, irrespective of the characters they are playing. From a random quirk of parental genetics, these people are blessed with interesting looks and characters, rich food for the hungry camera lens. They are fascinating to watch, entertaining and simply vibrant and exciting people to spend time with. The two leading men in Wake Up Dead Man are two such examples, one of them assumingly enjoying A-list movie stardom. Daniel Craig reportedly got paid $100 million for appearing in the two Knives Out sequels, which I have to say shocked me believing that the mega-paydays for actors were all but over. The other is an actor I first discovered on television but he stood out even on the small screen. I even tuned in to a series I would not normally watch, The Crown, because he was in it. Josh O’Connor is not a household name but he is well on his way to becoming one. I first saw him in the delightful and offbeat ITV comedy-drama The Durrells, a series with a very pleasing and distinctive almost subversive flavour with character humour gleaned from a dysfunctional family overseen by a single mother trying to survive on little money after relocating from Bournemouth to Corfu. O’Connor played one of the children, Larry Durrell, a writer and the eldest brother of his more famous scribbling sibling Gerald, the writer and naturalist famous for his book My Family and Other Animals. O’Connor held the screen like he was born to it, with finely developed comic chops to boot.
In Wake Up Dead Man, O’Connor plays a young priest Jud Duplenticy (nope, me neither) who’s sent to another parish after punching a colleague for being rude. He’s an ex-boxer who, in a heated and hateful frame of mind, killed a man in the ring (very The Quiet Man) and joined the priesthood out of guilt to atone for his past actions. Arriving at a church with a very long and largely inconsequential name in Upstate New York, he is confronted by Monsignor Wicks, played with burning fire, brimstone and a hefty dollop of relish by a grizzled Josh Brolin. The more fear he conjures up in his loyal parishioners, the more control he exerts over them. The arrival of an open hearted younger man, committed to peace and the teachings of Jesus (Heaven forbid), opens a battle of wits that starts and continues with Wicks’ confessions of multiple masturbations in multiple ways. His psychological broadsides – forgive the pun – come from all sides. That battle ends with Wicks’ murder, on the surface an impossible one. Enter you know who. I’d quite forgotten just how far Daniel Craig had wilfully meandered from a certain secret agent. His thick, US southern accent is pronounced only inches short of being affected, his attire immaculate and knocking on the door of dandy. But Craig is given many chances to shine and on one occasion he uses a giant and noisy prop to get people’s attention.
As ever, there is a roster of trusted talent playing the suspects, usual and otherwise. In no particular order, there’s Glenn Close as Martha, Wicks’ second in command. Her religiosity runs deep which is played mainly for laughs. When a sometime wheelchair bound Simone gets up to grab a biscuit, Martha screams “It’s a miracle!” making everyone jump until Simone wearily explains “I can walk. It just hurts.” A lovely and welcome surprise was seeing Jeremy Renner up and about playing a weak minded medic, Dr. Nat Sharp, a widower. You may know him as Hawkeye in the Marvel Cinematic Universe but you may not know that he suffered an accident a few years ago, so terrible and grotesque that not only did I think that he was a hairsbreadth away from death, I was convinced he’d never walk again. He described the accident in some horrific detail in his memoir My Next Breath but let’s just say if you slipped and fell in front of an inexorably moving 14,000 pound snowplough, you don’t get up, brush yourself down and walk away. So it’s a delightful surprise that he’s back on the big screen, all four limbs working. Sherlock’s Moriarty, (or now do we say the sexy priest from Fleabag?) Andrew Scott, plays a once best-selling author Lee who’s working on a book based on Monsignor Wicks. Thomas Haden Church, once Spider-man’s supervillain Sandman, plays Samson the groundskeeper and he’s head over heels in love with Martha. Cailee Spaeny, a survivor from Alien Romulus, plays Simone, a disabled concert cellist relying on Wicks for a personal miracle. Kerry Washington plays Vera, a lawyer forced to adopt a baby boy against her wishes. Finally, there’s the grown up adopted boy, Cy played by Daryl McCormack, a failed politician, with his eyes firmly on using a hidden fortune he thinks he’s inheriting to further his career. Again, the actor seemed familiar and a quick check revealed that he was one of the boyfriends in Apple’s rather brilliant Bad Sisters series. With ample support from Mila Kunis as the police chief and Jeffrey Wright (aka the latest incarnation of James Bond’s friend Felix Leiter), the bishop who sends Jud on his way, you could say that Johnson had assembled something of a dream cast, He said that he casts as if for a dinner party which is as good a criteria as any. You can tell from the finished film that the meal must have gone down really well.
There are two aspects of a whodunnit’s DNA that you have to get right and it is about as tricky a genre to perfect as you could ask for. Number one is that your audience should always be surprised at the outcome and number two, there should be enough on screen and coming out of the speakers for you to take a fair crack at the identity of the killer. With too few clues, you get frustrated at the author/filmmaker. Too many and it becomes obvious. It is not a good thing to let the audience get ahead of the film unless there’s a bigger pay off on the way. I was incredibly surprised how satisfying the BBC TV series Ludwig was. A puzzle-setter impersonates his missing police inspector twin brother and almost as an aside solves one murder after another. Get it right and whodunnits are so, so satisfying.
The smaller the nit-pick, the better the film. Cy, the social media obsessed politician is recording, it seems, his whole life on his iPhone in some sort of cut-price Steadicam frame. Now while I will buy without hesitation that modern iPhones are more than capable of shooting 4K zoomed in shots, I wasn’t convinced about the capabilities of the phone’s sound recording hardware. Johnson, like Trump with his endless “Fake news!” get out of jail cards, could probably argue that AI was capable of cleaning up a distant conversation into something that repeats throughout the film as if the conversation was recorded on state of the art digital recorders. The movie is well over two hours but there’s no extraneous fat on these bones. Intricate plots need time to consume every little detail. And there’s not a dull scene in the entire film. I had a hope that Hugh Grant might turn up again to add spice to Blanc’s character but in this one, he’s all alone with a puzzle to solve.
Rian Johnson has written and directed three very good whodunnits and while his commitment to Netflix is now delivered, who knows if we’ll see Benoit Blanc on screen again. Even if we don’t, the series has gone out with a winner.
