Knives Out
Now, as you all know if you read my comments on this here blog, I have a meat friend whom I call the Gaybrarian.
Our initial plan was to get together for New Year's Eve. But, he had to work a full day on that eve, and getting a Lyft or Uber after 7pm is an impossibility in LA on, again, that eve. So we decided to catch a movie and then head to my house for food and drinks on New Year's Day.
The movie we decided to watch was Knives Out. When I say that this is a pastiche of Clue, Deathtrap, and every Agatha Christie novel turned into a movie, I don't mean to minimize it. It is an amazing, as I say, mindfuck.
But it's more than that.
At the center of the film is the murder victim's nurse. (I say "murder victim" because I really don't want to give away any spoilers.)
She is an immigrant of indeterminate origin. At various points in the film, she is said to be from Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador, and Brazil. And this is to a point.
To the rich white family which features in the film, she is the "help". Oh, they consider her to be "family". But not really.
Her mother and sister are illegal immigrants, and this is one of the plot points on which this devilish story centers. At one point, at her employer's birthday party, his son-in-law, after a tirade about how "America is for Americans" (the son-in-law is played with raffish charm by Don Johnson—yes,
Sonny Crockett), he calls her over to tell them how she is one of the "good" immigrants.
The fact that none of her employer's family can be bothered to know where her family is from is a leitmotif of the film. She is a nonentity. She is the help who helps grease their lives, so that they don't have to worry about their father. On the surface they seem respectable white liberals, although when the booze flows, they reveal themselves to be anything but. (One of the family is portrayed as a neo-Nazi. At first, this is a problem. But as the movie goes along, his dark arts are sought after by the family.)
What Knives Out is about is the hypocrisy at the root of so much liberal discourse. It talks about the immigrant and the downtrodden. But when any of them threatens their comfortable lives, well, the knives come out.
As the child of immigrants, I see myself in Marta, and recognize her plight. But, as the star of the movie, Daniel Craig's hilarious detective Benoit Blanc points out, she beats them by not playing their game. She beats them without intending to, by being the decent person she is.
If you have time this weekend, do go watch this film. Not only is it a fiendish whodunit, but it is a critique of the times in which we find ourselves.