Fighting Off Sleep During “Wake Up Dead Man”

A word of warning: don’t watch Rian Johnson’s new mystery (now screening on Netflix) if you’re feeling the least bit groggy. I aired this film, following a long day and a good dinner, at a time when I hadn’t managed to have a good night’s sleep for quite a while. Sure enough, I got drowsy—which meant that some of the film’s many twists and turns eluded me completely, and I was forced to consult Wikipedia for a complete run-down on who did what to whom.

 Rian Johnson’s trademark, as writer and director, is crafting murder mysteries in which an innocent seems to be responsible for a brutal murder, until magnolia-scented sleuth Benoit Blanc (an always amusing Daniel Craig) shows up and unmasks the real killers. There’s a canvas crowded with famous faces, and we can be sure that most of them are up to no good. (You just know that Glenn Close—as an apparently sweet but also quite shrill church lady with her hair in a bun—is not as innocent as she seems . . . and I suspect that this much-admired thespian is having a ball playing such a prim role.) 

 Johnson always features a touch of social commentary, and in this film (the third and most complex in the Knives Out series) he takes on formal religion with a vengeance. He himself comes from an evangelical background, but as a filmmaker he can’t resist the baroque trappings beloved by the Roman Catholic Church. At the center of this drama are a good priest and a bad one, though both are certainly flawed individuals. Josh O’Connor (whom I last saw as a veddy British Prince Charles in The Crown) stars as a former teen boxer who once killed a man in the ring, and is still desperately trying (despite his genuine love of Christ’s teachings) to keep a raging temper in check. For a recent transgression, he’s been sent to an upstate New York town where a veteran priest, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks, presides over an ever-smaller congregation. Msgr. Wicks (Josh Brolin) is a fierce defender of his own power over the souls of the locals: in short, he’s not very nice. But this doesn’t stop him from being surrounded by a small circle of apparently hyper-loyal congregants, who all share his anger at the world outside the church’s walls.

 Following a sudden and dramatic murder in the cathedral, the young priest played by O’Connor seems the obvious suspect. But, needless to say, matters get quite twisty from there, involving all sorts of mistaken identities, not to mention something of a divine resurrection. (As you might expect, there WILL be blood.) Thank heavens for Benoit Blanc, whose sleuthing sorts out the guilty from the innocent, even as he makes quite clear his own discomfort with organized religion. And thank heavens for the Wikipedia plot summary that fills in the cracks of my own understanding. I recall having had something of the same problem with the first two Knives Out mysteries, even after watching the first one twice. It’s always clear who’s Naughty and who’s Nice, but the interplay between them is generally so tricky that viewers need all the help they can get.

 So, is this new edition of the Knives Out series worth seeing? It is if you like celebrity-driven mysteries and the chance to untangle an elaborate puzzle. No need to look for much depth in the film’s characterizations. But if you can stay alert—and if blood is your thing—the film’s many conundrums will give you much to ponder.

 

 

Spheroids and Triangles: "Challengers"

 

When the big new releases of 2024 came out, one that slipped past me was Luca Guadagnino’s tennis film, Challengers. This erotic triangle featuring a sexy young female tennis whiz and the two former best friends who lust after her seemed like an interesting departure from Guadagnino’s 2017 hit, Call Me By Your Name. Not that I was entirely entranced by the coming-of-age same-sex romance that gave us an eyeful of Timothée Chalamet—playing a sensitive young man awakening to his own budding sexual urges—clambering all over the golden-hued torso of Armie Hammer. It all seemed, frankly, a bit lugubrious, but critics and audiences clearly were swooning. 

I was curious to see Challengers because the dynamic among the three leads promised to be intriguing and because I wanted to see how Guadagnino handled female sexuality at his film’s center. Certainly he has put together an attractive cast, with the gorgeous  Zendaya rotating between a charmingly boyish Mike Faist (he was Riff in Spielberg’s take on West Side Story) and an appealingly scruffy Josh O’Connor (with an American accent that far removes him from his role as Prince Charles in The Crown).  The idea is that they all meet on the junior tennis circuit where the two very young men have just won a championship as doubles partners and Tashi  is an extraordinary young player with a scholarship to Stanford.

Then time passes, and Guadagnino gets fancy, jumping between various eras we can distinguish mostly because Tashi’s hair gets shorter and Art’s blond curls disappear. The jumps back and forth in chronology are so abrupt that for me it was never clear when several key plot points occurred. Does, for instance, a key tryst between Tashi and Patrick occur before or after she marries Art and bears his child?  I honestly don’t know. 

I can only tell you that Tashi’s behavior in the film is to me maddeningly unappealing. From the first, she’s using herself as a lure, promising her body to whichever of the two men wins an upcoming tournament. We’re supposed to see her as smart and scrappy, using tennis (as well as tennis players) to get what she wants out of life. Personally, although I couldn’t overlook Zendaya’s definite it-girl quality, I  could find nothing very attractive in her machinations. Does she ever feel a genuine emotional connection with either of the two men she keeps in thrall throughout the film? I suspect not . . . so who are we rooting for?

The film ends, predictably, with Tashi’s two lovers battling it out on center court in the finals of a tennis tournament that will determine their careers but also their romantic lives. I won’t tell you who wins, partly because the filmmaker chooses to go for ambiguity, in the service of a finale that is more symbolic than particularly meaningful. It made me think back to a much early moment in Challengers, wherein a teenage Tashi pays a visit to the room shared by the two brand-new junior champions. Both clearly have the hots for her; both badly want to get physical with this tantalizing young woman. First she makes out with Art, and then with Patrick. Suddenly they’re all three wildly kissing. Then she silently backs out of the tryst, leaving two fellows smooching one another. Which, I suspect, is Guadagnino’s real focus in this film: the mutual attraction/repulsion of two male contenders. I don’t think Guadagnino likes women very much. And this film is his way of using a woman as a catalyst to show us his fascination with male-on-male carnal desire.