SPOILER ALERT! SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS!
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! CLICK AWAY NOW WHILE YOU STILL CAN!
I’m embarrassed by how long it took me to watch this movie; it had been on my to-do list since I saw the first trailer in the movie theater in 2019. Man, remember back when hearing someone cough in a movie theater was an annoyance instead of a reason to panic? Anyway, let’s talk about Knives Out, directed by Rian Johnson, starring Christopher Plummer (RIP), Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Chris Evans, Daniel Craig, and Ana de Armas.
Harlan Thrombey (Plummer) shines as the aging patriarch of a rich family who built an empire on a successful string of mystery novels. His death turns out to be the last and greatest mystery of all, as his surviving family and staff are called in for questioning by Lieutenant Elliot (Lakeith Stanfield) and the enigmatic detective Benoit Blanc (Craig). As the threads of the story are slowly unraveled, we get an armchair analysis of a seemingly happy, successful family with all the privilege and power they could ever want. It doesn’t take Blanc long to find out that their happiness and success are a layer of lies covering a tangled skein of rage and betrayal. Shortly before he died, Thrombey went through his entire family, cutting off inheritances and terminating allowances in an attempt to de-program his deeply entitled children. And like entitled children, they freak the fuck out. Literally everyone is a suspect in this smart-mouthed, hair-pulling confection.
It’s a brilliantly woven mystery that turns several tropes of the genre on their ears: it tells you how he died in the very first scene, it tells you who did it about twenty minutes later, and the detective isn’t exceptionally brilliant. Rather than being a miracle of observation and cleverness like Holmes or Poroit, Blanc just lets his subjects talk, watches what they do, and waits for the truth to make itself known. And it does, much to the Thrombey family’s chagrin.
But the real genius of the film is in what it has to say about privileged white society. Harlan’s closest confidante is his in-home nurse, an immigrant named Marta Cabrera. Out of everyone in the family, she is the only one who has no expectations and makes no demands of him, and in the end she is the sole inheritor of his entire estate. The rest of his children and children-in-law are grasping, self-important, and spoiled, and they turn on Marta like a pack of starving dogs when they learn the truth.
Like another successful thriller in which Lakeith Stanfield was a featured character–the incomparable Get Out–Knives Out satirizes white liberal racism. In Get Out, the main baddie tells the hero, “I would have voted for Obama a third time if I could.” And I believe that he was telling the truth there. White people, conservative and liberal alike, are capable of supporting a Black man in theory while victimizing others in their day-to-day lives. And just like in Get Out, the terrible people in Knives Out say all the right things in the beginning and behave kindly toward the immigrant employee, but only when it doesn’t cost them anything to do so. Each member of the Thrombey family is different from the others in ideology, and they each represent a different archetype of the classic American racist. I’ve made a little list of each major player and what I think they symbolize about anti-immigrant racism.
Harlan’s daughter, Linda Drysdale (Curtis), considers herself a self-made success story who built everything herself from the bottom up. She and her husband Richard (Johnson) are solid conservative types who believe in bootstraps and the American dream in the way only someone who was handed millions in seed money can. Linda is friendly toward Marta and apologizes for not inviting her to Harlan’s funeral. “I was outvoted.” In other words, she’s only as kind as she can get away with when it doesn’t cost her the approval of her family. Richard is more outspoken in his conservatism; he supports Trump and believes in immigrants coming to the US “the right way.” (Even though the asylum seekers currently in detention DID in fact try to come here “the right way,” look it up.) He approves of Marta, because he assumes that since she is hardworking, honest, and kind, she must have come here in a way that he would approve of. It’s an interesting assumption from people who never even took the time to learn what country she’s from.
Joni Thrombey (Toni Collette), the wife of Harlan’s deceased son, is a crunchy liberal hippie who fights with Richard about Trump’s child separation policy but turns into a feral cat towards Marta when she finds out who’s the true heir to the Thrombey fortune. Like Linda, her support is conditional. Her daughter Meg (Katherine Langford) is almost worse. Meg verbally defends Marta from a police officer who calls her “the help,” hugs her and treats her like a friend, but when her family pressure on her, she betrays Marta and tries to force her to give up her fortune. Like Joni, her progressive ideals are only skin-deep. But she feels REALLY bad about it, guys.
Walt, Harlan’s youngest son (Michael Shannon), tells Marta early in the movie that the family will always “take care” of her because she took such good care of his father. That avuncular concern dissipates into ugliness when Walt takes it upon himself to visit Marta at her home and threaten her mother with deportation in an attempt to pressure her to give up her inheritance. Marta fends him off verbally, but the encounter leaves her (and the audience) shaken. It makes one wonder what else he’s capable of. His son Jacob (Jaedan Martell) is an interesting character. Through most of the movie he has few lines and barely looks up from his phone. Walt calls him “politically active;” Meg calls him an alt-right troll. The only time he is fully engaged in the goings-on is when his family turns on Marta and start screaming at her. He joins in enthusiastically and accuses Marta of sleeping with his grandfather for money. That feels very symbolic to me. Trolls and online fascists are a minority and have very little power on their own, but when the “normal” people around them grant permission and look the other way, they will raise the ugliness factor exponentially.
Linda and Richard’s son Ransom (Evans) is probably the most honest of the Thrombey clan. He is a creature of pure self-interest with none of the protective coloration of respectability that the others have. When they find out that he’s been cut out of the will, the rest of the clan tries to kill him with kindness.
“This might be the best thing that could happen to you.”
“Maybe now you’ll finally grow up.”
“Nothing good is ever easy.”
The joke is on them ten minutes later though, when they find out that they’re in the exact same boat. They all pretended to be self-made contributors to society, but it doesn’t take long to realize that they depend on and feel entitled to their father’s money. Ransom Drysdale is the only one out of the family who doesn’t fake respectability. He literally only cares about himself, and the only reason he came to the reading of the will was to see the looks on everyone’s faces when they find out they’re no better off than he is.
Knives Out is a smart, fun, entertaining thriller that makes some very good points about how the US treats immigrants. Most of us will defend minorities in the abstract and say all the right things when we’re debating with a Trump supporter. But when our privilege feels threatened, when we think that we might not get what we think we’re “owed” by society, when we are frightened by the implication that we might not be as special as we think we are… the knives come out.
Dawn Napier 