BEFORE: It's a week of great change here at the Movie Year, Thursday I had training for my new job, and today I have my first shift. I'm working at another movie theater, but a very different one, it's run by a college in Manhattan, but it's also the home for some mini-film festivals, also special events and once in a while, a premiere event for a major film. So this will be very different from working as an usher in a 7-screen chain theater, I'll now be an event coordinator in a 2-screen private theater, and in essence it's something of a management position. That's great in many ways, and I'm trying very hard to not miss my previous gig.
But since it's also a major change in my life, I'm vulnerable and nervous and plagued with self-doubt, which has manifested itself as a series of nightmares (I've also had a cold, so my wife says I've had "sick dreams") where I try over and over to get things done but I can't make any progress, and the dreams seem to last for hours. After "Trolls World Tour" I had a nightmare where I tried to watch a movie, realized it was the wrong movie, stopped it and started it again. Then I realized again, that was the wrong movie, stopped it and started it again. But I actually had technical problems in real life watching that movie, the Playstation kept losing its internet connection, which mean Hulu kept crashing, so I really did have to keep stopping the movie and starting it up again, so I can see exactly where that nightmare came from.
Naturally, after spending two days at my parents' house, and dealing with issues ranging from trying to find a good movie for THEM to watch, trying to make dinner choices with them and then trying to convince my mother to move into assisted living, at least for a few months over the winter so she'll have access to physical therapy and my dad won't have to shovel snow, I got very frustrated trying to fix their problems in addition to my own, and I had nightmares about that when I got back to New York.
So my life is suddenly a big bunch of unsolvable conundrums, puzzles if you will, and at night my brain tries unsuccessfully to figure them out - when I'd much rather have my brain switch itself off at night and just let me sleep peacefully. Even learning that my dad had a dog when he was a teenager, which I'd never known before, served as nightmare fuel. He didn't seem eager to talk about the dog, and what he did say led me to believe that he might have accidentally run over his own dog, so that's another bad dream for me right there. These are difficult times, for sure.
David Denman carries over from "Brightburn".
THE PLOT: Agnes, taken for granted as a suburban mother, discovers a passion for solving jigsaw puzzles which unexpectedly draws her into a new world - where her life unfolds in ways she could never have imagined.
AFTER: Well, jeez, thank God I never had kids, that just seems like a road filled with more challenging situations than I'd ever be able to handle. The lead character here is a mother with two teen/adult sons, one who works in his father's auto shop but secretly dreams of culinary school, partially because his mother is a good cook, and generally seems to be able to balance so many different tasks in her life. The other son is about to graduate high school, but instead of writing his college essays, he's leaning toward taking a year off just to travel to Tibet with his girlfriend. One one hand, terrible idea, but on the other hand, if he doesn't do it then, then when?
Agnes doesn't really have it all together, of course - she's burdened by taking care of her two sons and her husband - David Denman seems to have a lock on playing these insensitive, meathead blue-collar types, right? - and just generally she seems very out of sorts, like she's sleepwalking through her own life. Part of this seems to be a response to conditioning, like she has to bake her own birthday cake and do the majority of the chores, and even when the family is short on money, her getting a job appears to be out of the question. Sure, somebody has to maintain the household, but this whole arrangement seems very outdated.
One day she completes a jigsaw puzzle that was one of her birthday presents, and seems to complete it rather quickly. Yet it also seems like she's never done a jigsaw puzzle before - how is that possible? Hasn't every human done a puzzle at some point in their lives, like as a kid isn't that naturally part of the learning process? Like, kids have nothing but time and given her age, it's probably something that her parents had her do to keep her busy and out of trouble, wouldn't you think? So it doesn't make sense here that she's naturally good at something she's never done before - I kind of had the same problem with "The Queen's Gambit" when I watched that series a few weeks ago. Chess is so complicated that there's no such thing as a "natural" player, all over the world small children are taught the basics and it takes YEARS to become a good player, even longer to be competitive. Yet we're supposed to believe that Beth in "Queen's Gambit" gets there super-fast because she's given the right drugs in an orphanage, has some prophetic dreams about strategy, and then is helped along by developing a drinking problem and sleeping with the right male players? That's just not how chess works.
I have to believe that the jigsaw puzzle here is a metaphor, an attempt to make order out of chaos, to take her random chaotic life and re-assemble the pieces into something coherent, where she can see that the bigger picture, whole and complete. But then with a jigsaw, once you finish it, what do you do? You tear it apart again, put it away, and then maybe move on to a different puzzle. But that's not what Agnes does, she keeps doing the SAME puzzle over and over again - maybe she only owns one, but then wouldn't that get very boring, solving the same puzzle again and again? Nobody does that, so it seems like more metaphor, now for a repetitive, boring life. Yes, her solving time keeps getting better, but since it's the same puzzle, that doesn't really count.
She can't find another jigsaw at home, so she travels into Manhattan (apparently she lives in upstate NY, but I'm not really sure where) to a puzzle store to buy a couple more. Has she just never learned to buy something from the internet? This plot point seems very clunky, because it's designed to put her in touch with the former jigsaw champion who's looking for a new competition partner. But I still can't get past it - when you factor in the cost of the Metro-North tickets, the cab ride to the puzzle store, probably an overpriced lunch in Midtown, those two $15 jigsaw puzzles are going to end up costing her close to $100 bucks. And times are tough, can her family afford to have her spending this much on a trip into the city to buy two puzzles? Again, clunky clunkity clunk.
She agrees to meet with Robert, the eccentric former inventor and puzzle champion, twice a week, so they can do jigsaws and prepare themselves for competition play - but she lies to her husband about her whereabouts, giving this puzzle hobby the same secretive nature as an affair. It's another potential sign that she's unhappy with her marriage, if she needs to have this personal outlet on the side, and keep it under wraps. Eventually she'll have to either tell her husband what she's up to, because those Metro-North charges keep piling up - then there's the side problem of paying for college and/or culinary school, maybe they can sell their vacation property, but those are all difficult conversations that keep getting put off, again and again.
Eventually there are resolutions, of a kind, anyway - and maybe you don't agree with the choices made, because they seem perhaps a bit out of left field. Upon further reflection, I've decided that if I continue with the jigsaw puzzle as metaphor, it feels like Agnes eventually got tired of solving the same puzzle over and over again, and just sort of moved on to find another one. It makes sense, but it doesn't really feel like everything got resolved. Maybe nothing ever does and we only fool ourselves into thinking they do, and there are references to Buddhism in the film, suggesting that happiness is just an illusion. It pains me to consider this as a possibility, yet I fear that I must.
The ultimate clunkage, though, comes in both using puzzles as a metaphor for life - the struggle to make order out of chaos - but then also telling us at the same time that a puzzle CAN'T be a metaphor for life, because life is always messy, random and out of our control, but completing a puzzle is at least possible, given enough time and effort. So, which is it, is life like a puzzle or is life NOT like a puzzle? And NITPICK POINT, how does Agnes hope to win a competition if she never looks like she's got any energy or pep in her step? Sure, maybe there's an advantage to be gained from remaining calm and collected under pressure, but the other competitors have a little thing called SPEED and that's probably more beneficial in the end.
Also starring Kelly Macdonald (last seen in "Tristram Shandy: A Cock& Bull Story"), Irrfan Khan (last seen in "Inferno"), Bubba Weiler, Austin Abrams (last seen in "We Don't Belong Here"), Liv Hewson (last seen in "Bombshell"), Daniel Stewart Sherman (last seen in "Marshall"), Helen Coxe, Lori Hammel, Barry Godin, Myrna Cabello (last seen in "A Most Violent Year"), Audrie Neenan.
RATING: 4 out of 10 Easter baskets
No comments:
Post a Comment