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.

 

 

Peeling Back a Glass Onion

I was excited when the new Knives Out film was announced. It played briefly in cinemas around Thanksgiving, creating a box-office flurry. So eager, apparently, was the public to watch the further adventures of  super-sleuth Benoit Blanc that it was said producers had missed a lucrative bet by withdrawing the film from theatres so as to release it on Netflix starting December 23.

 I personally waited until December 25 to screen it in my living room, as a reward for surviving a large family party. Of course I was waiting for something with the wit of the original. Aside from Daniel Craig’s droll portrayal of a rather effete N’Orleans private eye, Knives Out had a twisty plot, featuring a group of greedy relatives all perched like vultures over the corpse of their very wealthy and very dead uncle. With the cast filled out by such skilled players as Christopher Plummer (as the dead man), Toni Collette, Michael Shannon, and a hilariously bitchy Jamie Lee Curtis, it was clear from the start that the audience was in good hands. There was also a new screen discovery,  Cuban-born Ana de Armas, as a sympathetic counter-balance to all the venality around her. Playing Plummer’s conscientious nurse, she is someone we can root for, even when it begins to seem that his passing is a result of her carelessness. Amid all the film’s crass characters, I liked the fact that our center of gravity was a young working-class woman with both a conscience and a mother whose undocumented status made her vulnerable to outside pressures.

 Writer/director Rian Johnson also showed off in Knives Out his fondness for tricks and word games, one of which tickled me belatedly. There’s a throwaway driving scene in which Blanc starts crooning a lyric from Stephen Sondheim’s Follies: “The sun comes up/ I think about you/ the coffee cup/ I think about you.” It was only later that I realized this snatch of song wittily points to the film’s ending, and a very distinctive coffee cup. Aha!

 So what about Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery? It too is full of jokes and pop culture references. Some world-famous paintings play an ironic role in the story, and some movieland royals (most notably Hugh Grant) show up in small roles. Much has been made of the fact that both the late Stephen Sondheim and the late Angela Lansbury briefly play themselves on a Zoom conference call with Blanc. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is there too, and Serena Williams pops up for several amusing seconds.

 All of this is fun, and of course there’s a mystery to be solved by the ever-perceptive Blanc.  Here’s the problem: though there are gags and twists aplenty, the Glass Onion story lacks any semblance of heart. Yes, we can enjoy the fabulous Greek island sets, and of course the cast is once again star-studded, featuring Kate Hudson, Leslie Odom Jr., Kathryn Hahn, and particularly Edward Norton as a billionaire tech bro who owns these palatial surroundings. They’re supposedly old friends with complicated ties to one another, but as a group they’re not nearly as interesting (or as well-explored) as the feuding family circle in Knives Out. Janelle Monáe, in a more challenging role, fulfills the Ana de Armas function by being someone with whom we can sympathize, but her plight—cleverly introduced by Johnson—lacks the urgency we felt in the previous movie.

 As for Benoit Blanc himself, we know from the start that he’s the world’s most famous detective. So this time we don’t have the fun of discovering just what he’s capable of.