Movie Review: Puzzle

Puzzle is director Marc Turtletaub's latest offering. It is a very simple highly nuanced film about a woman named Agnes, played by the luminous Kelly Macdonald, who slowly awakens to the fact that life is passing her by. She also realizes that she has been stuck behind the fortress walls of her marriage for so long that she no longer sees the approaching of the train but only the lights of the caboose as it leaves the station. One day she decides to get on board.

I live in a very small town in the middle of Fresno and Bakersfield. We have no movie theater and often I am left to the repetitive offerings of HBO and Showtime to provide some modicum of entertainment. The situation is aggravated by the fact that Hollywood Studios turned the summer over to comic book heroes, stories about dogs and robot dogs, and the endless sequels of the sequels of other sequels.
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It's easy to see why when a grown-up movie like Puzzle opened in nearby Fresno, I jumped at the chance to go see it. I literally ran to out to the car, jumped in, and covered sixty plus miles like a bat out of hell for the chance to see something rarer than a two-headed unicorn, a film about adults engaging in real life adult activities.

I was apprehensive because I had read somewhere that the film unfolded at a measured pace. Measured is precisely the word that I would use to describe it, not slow but measured.  The viewers are allowed time to mull over what they see on the screen, and this is a good thing because several of the scenes need to be thoroughly digested before swallowed.

This is not a movie about comic book super heroes; there are no bullets flying or car crashes to signify that the scenes are supposed to be powerful. It's one of those old fashioned movies like the studios use to make before they discovered they could still make money by cutting corners on creativity and honesty. A beautiful musical score does help the film unwind with threads of classical music sewing the scenes together. 

The best part of the movie is the story; this says a lot because the acting is also impeccable. The film takes place in a rural suburb of New York City where a middle aged married couple (Agnes and Louie) exist in world of stifling domesticity. From the opening scene of a party, the house they live in is shown to be as dark and gloomy as a castle in the Middle Ages. 

The problem is that Agnes is only going through the motions of living as she takes care of her hardworking husband and their two sons, one of which (Gabe) has been anointed as the golden child who can do no wrong while the other (Ziggy) is as stunted as his mother because of the inability of his father to hide his disappointment in this son. Ziggy wants to be a cook; his father wants him to have a more manly occupation.  

The movie gathers steam slowly, and as it builds, it becomes increasingly harder to watch because of how accurately it depicts the breakdown of the structural underpinnings of a marriage of two fundamentally good people. I'm divorced myself and there were times that the actions, words, and lack of words on the screen mirrored my own experiences so perfectly they peeled away the concrete slabs I had placed upon holes where I had buried the memories. I cried a bit, the theater type of crying, where you surreptitiously wipe your eyes with a popcorn napkin.

The most compelling scene was watching as Louie, a kind, loving, and decent husband get utterly demolished for his love of safety, stability and tradition, in other words, doing what he thought of as his duty to his family. Puzzle is disturbing because the film explicitly states that the old ways of doing things are dead and only produced concentration camp survivors anyway, and also implicitly suggests that marriages are where the influence for zombie movies originated.

I cannot buy into this. I look at it honestly too and readily admit that neither of my parents ever achieved anywhere near their true potential; the confines of our small house and the strict rules of engagement held them back. But in the end, the image of their life together, battled hardened, time tested, scarred and firmly rooted in the history of our lives is a thing of great beauty, a withered, silvered oak tree in a moonlit clearing.

My parents  worked hard to free my brothers and I to choose our own path in life. Most movies are locked into the immediacy of the moment, and therefore reveal each moment in a quantum sense, millions of possibilities and one choice to rule them all, forgetting that the past has as much power, probably more, than the present in determining our future. All those rejected choices and the reasons that led to their rejection will haunt us all the days of our life. We all travel down our own road one step at a time; we don't magically appear at the crossroads.

I was Louie.  I know exactly what he felt and could even quote the unvoiced thoughts that caused his tongue to freeze.  The film takes great pain to show that there was no intent to his crime, and that he was also a victim of the sense of responsibility that had been handed down from every male ancestor beginning with Adam.

The film does strive to make that point, but in  it's most telling moment, Agnes rejects it all. My wife's exact words were, "I deserve better," and there is nothing she could have said that could have hurt me any worse, being the final twist of the blade as she plunged it into my heart.

Agnes started changing pretty quickly. She immediately started lying to Louie and also missing confession. These scenes were revealing in how they showed how much she had to harden her heart against Louie; Kelly MacDonald's face at certain moments was a perfect canvas to illustrate the anguish and the heart break that comes with being compelled to break someone's else's heart, but there were other moments where she seemed to relish in the deed. And I didn't like how easy it was for Agnes to cast aside her past where she first learned to lie; her marriage, a structure built on lies;  and her religion where she also told lies.  I don't say this because I think that the scene was not realistic. It was perfectly real.

I sense that Hollywood always seems to have a grudge against the Judeo-Christian religion, and in particular against the Old Testament deity. They wrongly feel it's impossible to express creativity with boundaries and limitations always knocking at your door.

It's like they want to make some Kool-Aid pops but decide to forgo the ice trays and instead pour the liquid on the floor; it results in a colorful mess but lacks the structure of Kool Aid pops.

There are always limitations and true creativity comes  from knowing just as much what shouldn't be said than trimming its harsh nature to blend in with your delusions.

Hollywood also has, at times, the religious sensibility of a acne scarred high school kid who listens to Marilynn Manson with head phones on, so his daddy doesn't hear the lyrics. 

It unfailingly attacks using the lamest arguments against the weakest targets, always pretending (I hope they are only pretending) they don't notice that most of the crimes that they  excitedly point out and lay on God, are the crimes of human beings against other human beings. Crimes of men and women who rebel against rejection, lionize their owns failings and try to take it out on those of us who try.

The argument that we should hate God because he didn't magically reach out and stop the flood was dismissed by the time of the Enlightenment. It never held much water anyway. There  are the  beautiful mythological and psychological statements made at the beginning of the Bible that Agnes needs to understand, and yet the makers of this film are so willing to ignore.

The rules and limits came with creation, they are not just a grocery list of God's arbitrary likes and dislikes. Cain slew his brother because he did not get the same blessings that Abel received because he did not want to live in with the limitations of life as explained in the rules. The mark that he was cursed with was a Che Guevara t-shirt, one he picked out himself because it told the whole world that his Daddy had the audacity to tell him no.

God also didn't create Agnes's marriage, and it's a mistake to put the blame squarely upon creation which is exactly the meaning of the scene where she destroys her husband. Agnes made her own choices, she is the one who is the most responsible for the tragedy of her life, a tragedy that will continue to unfold until she realizes that it is how you react to the opposition that creates life and not how you run away. You run away and life will follow; you still have to quit lying to yourself and deal.

Is Agnes going to ditch her husband, gain the freedom she so desperately craves, and by so doing create for herself a more meaningful life that actually has less meaning? Writers can argue the finer aspects of existentialism all they want; it's still putting lipstick on a pig.

Existentialism is only Nihilism dressed up for a Dinner party. Nietzsche committed suicide after trying and failing to figure out how to make that pig look better.

I worry. I'm not altogether sure that Agnes's new life will be all that much better than the old. It's how we handle the playing field and the rules that make our games more meaningful. People who fail to tailor their life to, around, or even through the limitations life brings, all too often, end up lonely and staring at TV screens, writing in their dairies with invisible ink about how excited they are with the prospects of their fifth marriage, sleeping in the streets, or eating at soup kitchens funded by the their so-called moral superiors.

Agnes also sleeps with another man making the point that monogamy stifles sexual desire. Movies have been driving this point home for a such a long tedious time.  If you want to sleep with multiple partners, go sleep with them. But there are always right ways and wrong ways to go about doing things, and Hollywood, for all its finger wagging and bracelet rattling, is more often than not morally bankrupt when it pushes agendas that smash traditions and institutions that stabilize society and then offer up hedonism, robotic super heroes, free sex and happy faced emojis as replacement.

Living without material anchors is not all fun and games. I did it for awhile after my divorce. It was like free falling in a formless void where there are no lines and angles to differentiate one thing from another. It's closer to being an endless LSD trip than a meaningful way to live.

While it was somewhat liberating and opened up my creativity a bit, I realized much later that it's far better  to park a vacation trailer in my subconscious somewhere and maintain my home in the conscious world, especially when I need to sleep on a real mattress.

I'm pretty sure that those who made the movie would prefer that the audience just assumes that Agnes reestablishes her spiritual side by picking up a set of new spiritual values that accessorizes her new clothing well, values that are less demanding, less permanent, values that are trending at the moment. Or, according to taste, maybe she becomes a Buddhist, and I mean a Hollywood Buddhist, where one unrolls a mat autographed by the Dali Lama, and meditates on the patio overlooking the pool that overlooks Beverly Hills.  But then Buddhism  preaches the absence of desire, so I am not sure that will work for Agnes either as it is her unfilled desires that determines every choice she makes.

Over 870,000 people divorce each year in America. Even with its flaws, this is a movie that all of those people who went through divorce should see. It is the kind of film that can bring much needed closure to some and also help a bit to heal the wounded hearts of others. It's like spending an hour and forty-five minutes looking in a mirror watching a play being performed in the interior of your own home, one written by Lilian Hellman or Arthur Miller.

It would also be a good film for young married couples as well because of how it offers up a strong warning about the bitter poison of complacency and neglect. It would have been helpful for me to understand back in the day that marriages are like sharks in that neither sharks or married couples can afford to linger but must constantly move forward in order to survive.

I don't know a a lot about how a real professional goes about analyzing movies. All I can say is that Puzzle was well worth a drive to Fresno. Take along some Kleenex though. Popcorn napkins are a little rough, and be prepared to talk on the way home, even if it's just to yourself.


 
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