Agatha Christie for the Trump era. Knives Out, Reviewed.

I spent much of yesterday evening thinking about the wonderful Christopher Plummer and what he hath left us. Veteran of the Stratford Ontario Shakespeare festival, there was a hint of the big stage actor in every screen performance he gave. The subtlest and most discreet of his appearances in films always suggested the idea of a caged tiger. You could ask him to play a junior librarian and there would still always be a glint in the eye that indicated a frayed rope attached to a booming Mark Antony.

So yesterday we finally got around to seeing Knives Out, in his honour. Of course it was a bit disappointing to see his first appearance as a dead body, but the flashbacks soon filled him in. It was the sort of performance that resonated in everybody else’s performance. Even when he was gone, his descendants were reacting to his echo.

Rian Johnson’s Knives Out (2019) starts out by very deliberately paying tribute to Sleuth (1972), even borrowing some of the same props seemingly. It’s the Sleuth house, the house of a prolific crime writer transported from Olde to New England. Of course, the great thing about Sleuth is that it takes the classic country house murder setting, the setting for the kind of murder that Orwell waxed elegiac about, and then subjects it to an external critique. Both movies manage to be escapist and anti-escapist at the same time. In both cases, an interloper is denounced as a non-native. Michael Caine’s Milo Tindle, is the son of an Italian immigrant. Ana de Armas’s Marta Cabrera is casually ascribed to four different Latin American countries in the course of the movie.

Both Milo and Marta subject the smug nativist seat of privilege to a withering critique, goading the nativists into losing their tempers and with their tempers, their calm and assuming authority. Once so-called “aristocrats” have lost their composure, their power is fatally compromised.

Marta is summoned at one point to validate a point made by a loathsome Trumpian – she bullied to declare herself “one of the good ones” – an immigrant who will toil gratefully and wait her turn for the blessings of citizenship.

This becomes a film about whether or not Marta and Harlan Thrombey (Plummer) can ultimately triumph against the rest of the family. And it’s delightfully tense and engaging throughout.

In the course of the film, nativism is brilliantly undermined. It is pointed out near the end of the film that this “ancestral” mansion was only purchased by Thrombey in the 1980s. Everything about the place is a fake. It is because dynastic pretensions are ludicrous that they are so histrionically defended, of course.

And so farewell, Christopher Plummer. Farewell Captain Von Trapp. Farewell Atahualpa. Farewell Duke of Wellington. Farewell Sherlock Holmes. Farewell Emperor of the Universe. Farewell Rev. Jonathan Whirley. Farewell Harlan Thrombey.

Farewell. Adieu. To yieu and yieu and yieu and yieu and yieu and yieu and yieu….