Puzzle puzzles but finds an odd fit

Movie review: Puzzle

Marc Turtletaub’s English remake of an Argentine art-house favourite is a pretty box of carefully crafted small moments that form a big picture of a still life.

Puzzle

4/5

Starring: Kelly Macdonald, Irrfan Khan, David Denham

Directed by: Marc Turtletaub

Running time: 1 hr 43 mins

Rating: Restricted

By Katherine Monk

Puzzles bring order to the chaos because you know, with absolute certainty, you made the right decisions. You solved the riddle. For a brief moment, you mastered life.

You don’t need a decoder ring to realize this is the central thread in Puzzle, a remake of Natalia Smirnoff’s Argentine film Rompecabezas. Director Marc Turtletaub recognized his own mother in the story, prompting him to take a chance and turn from producing (Little Miss Sunshine) to calling the shots.

Yet, this is more than a personal victory. Puzzle seems to capture the fragmented truth of so many women who never got the chance to live the life they truly wanted.

Agnes (Kelly Macdonald) lives in Bridgeport, Connecticut with her husband Louie (David Denham) and their two adult sons. She wears a delicate crucifix around her neck, attends church regularly, and on the day we meet her, prepares an entire birthday celebration. We assume it’s for her husband, or her kids. Moments later, the picture comes together and we realize she baked her own birthday cake, hung her own decorations and, sure enough, cleaned up after her own party.

Yet, this is more than a personal victory. Puzzle seems to capture the fragmented truth of so many women who never got the chance to live the life they truly wanted.

Her boys clearly love her, but she’s been cooking, cleaning and doing laundry for so long, she’s become a housekeeping assumption. She and the whole house feel stuck in a different era — circa 1950 — where women stayed in the kitchen, and men fixed cars and told their wives “you’re so cute” with a patronizing peck on the forehead.

Agnes seems resigned to her fate, sleeping with her snoring husband and making breakfast as the sun rises, without so much as a peep of despair. She copes through a sense of wilful numbness, and a stoic expression that never blossoms into a full smile — just a hint of a settled crescent across her pale, angelic face.

She amuses herself by predicting quotidian rituals, looking for patterns in the dull churn of days. Yet, when she opens her birthday gifts after the guests have left, she finds a jigsaw puzzle of the world — and for some reason, points at Montreal.

A few scenes later, she’s assembled the whole 1,000-piece map. This is where I, an avid jigsaw puzzler myself, fumbled with the realism. The puzzle was practically all orange. The gradations of shades were tough to discern and the map featured no borders and very little text. It was a tough puzzle and she put it together in a few hours.

This is where I, an avid jigsaw puzzler myself, fumbled with the realism. The puzzle was practically all orange. The gradations of shades were tough to discern and the map featured no borders and very little text. It was a tough puzzle and she put it together in a few hours.

Harumph!

Yet, this was all part of Turtletaub’s subtle, and rather brilliant, design. The moment you asked this movie a question, the answer to your riddle was in front of your nose. The puzzle, it turns out, was supposed to be extremely hard. Agnes simply had a hidden talent for solving them, and when she rediscovers that talent, her entire life begins to look different.

She takes the train into the city to look for more challenging puzzles, and because it’s New York, she finds a boutique specializing in the old-fangled analog pastime. She also spots a tear-off ad: A puzzle champion is desperately seeking a new partner.

Gathering her courage, and uncharacteristically willing to lie, she heads back to New York and meets Robert (Irrfan Khan), a handsome millionaire who tells her there’s such a thing as a jigsaw competition.

Again, you can put the pieces together on your own: Robert and Agnes discover a mutual attraction, forcing Agnes to examine her life back home with new vision — and suddenly, things don’t fit together the same way they used to.

The whole thing plays out rather predictably, but Turtletaub doesn’t try to obscure the obvious. The proverbial picture is on the front of the box, what makes this movie fun and believable is the way we get to watch the individual pieces form the larger whole.

Macdonald (Harry Potter, No Country for Old Men) is alternately porous and impenetrable as the porcelain Agnes, the devout Catholic who lets herself fall. What feels like an impossibility from afar suddenly looks, and feels, entirely plausible thanks to Macdonald’s ability to conjure sympathy by merely resisting the mundane. Agnes sees the magic, and lets herself become a part of it by releasing expectation and following her own urges.

The whole thing plays out rather predictably, but Turtletaub doesn’t try to obscure the obvious. The proverbial picture is on the front of the box, what makes this movie fun and believable is the way we get to watch the individual pieces form the larger whole.

It’s such a subtle thing in terms of drama, yet such a monumental shift in character, that at times, you think Turtletaub is bordering on slapstick. And he is, for if anything captures the very essence of the human comedy, it’s a jigsaw puzzle in a box — a seemingly random collection of abstract shapes and designs that fit together, providing you have the patience, the desire and the delusion that somehow, the act of solving it means something.

@katherinemonk

THE EX-PRESS, August 11, 2018
Read The Ex-Press movie reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

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Review: Puzzle

User Rating

4 (3 Votes)

Summary

4Score

It’s such a subtle thing in terms of drama, yet such a monumental shift in character, that at times, you think Turtletaub is bordering on slapstick. And he is, for if anything captures the very essence of the human comedy, it’s a jigsaw puzzle in a box — a seemingly random collection of abstract shapes and designs that fit together, providing you have the patience, the desire and the delusion that somehow, the act of solving it means something. -- Katherine Monk

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