Puzzle is a tiny wonder. It begins with modest ambitions. Agnes is a housewife in Bridgeport, Connecticut who has seen precious little of the world outside her family and church, and has spent her life seeing to the needs of others. Having reached her 40’s without knowing what her own needs are, she is not repressed. Rather, she simply knows no other life; neither do the other women in her circle. We can guess it was simply the way of things that she would grow up and get married and have kids and devote herself to these things, and she did it because it was the way, because generations before her had made it the way, and on and on in a loop.
The film opens on a birthday party. Louis (David Denman) drinks and breaks a plate, which his wife Agnes (Kelly MacDonald) scrambles to clean up even as she also prepares the cake. She puts the candles on it, presents it to the guests, and then blows the candles out. That she is doing most of the work on her birthday is something that seems imprisoning, but also a state of affairs she herself would not likely question. She has cared for men and others since her immigrant father became ill, and not only is it second nature to her, it is also so to every woman she ever knows.
She eventually points this out to Robert (Irrfan Khan), a retired New York millionaire who once invented something and now competes in competitive jigsaw puzzle building. She received such a puzzle for her birthday, and found that 1000 pieces were not nearly enough to daunt her. Now they are puzzle partners, and soon they will be pushing towards more than that, but she is perplexed when he does not want kids: “It’s not weird, just different from me…and everyone else I’ve ever known.” Hers is a world of potlucks, Sunday Mass, and lots of children; you can see the old church steeple from her front porch. Her oldest son Ziggy (Buddy Weiler) had bad grades in school and is stuck. Her youngest son Gabe (Austin Abrams) is an overconfident young man with a vegan Buddhist girlfriend (Liv Hewson); he pens a college acceptance letter disparaging his mother’s lack of worldliness, demanding a life different from hers, that drips with irony. She accidentally finds it. She does not take it to him. She would never do that.
This might seem silly to those of you who grew up in a more modern environment. To me, it is recognizable, a pattern of lives spent in flyover country that I did not question until early adulthood. The scene in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska in which the men watch football while the women cook dinner comes to mind, as I recall it being derided as stereotypical of people in the middle of the country by a coastal critic; I never knew a household growing up where that did not happen. Why, you might ask, doesn’t Agnes simply go do what she wants, when she wants, how she wants? The crucial mistake here it to immediately assume this is not what she wants. As the movie goes on and Agnes discovers new things about herself, she also learns that there is much about her ordinary, dull, beautiful life she would actively choose if she’d made a choice. She would choose her children, and the greatest epiphany in her awakening is that she likes to spend time with them, rather than just raising them. She may have chosen her husband or one like him, who is not a lout or abusive or unfaithful. He is simply rather uninspired, but this is driven by the same wheel ‘o’ tradition that Agnes’s own life is.
I admit I found Louie an interesting person to see on screen, and want to spend a few minutes on David Denman before I return to the universally effusive praise for Kelly MacDonald. He has a thankless role. Many will simply regard him as unmemorable, and some will no doubt declare him an icon of patriarchy. He is neither. He loves a wife who never really got to decide if she loves him, and he does so in the only way many working class, non-metropolitan men are ever taught to do: by being the provider. His concerns are real. He worries about his weight and health, he strives to keep his garage’s financial struggles from burdening his family, he attempts to understand new ideas like Buddhism, and he it hurts him when his wife is unfaithful; he really doesn’t understand why she would do that. His failings are also real, from lamenting a lack of manliness in his oldest son’s desire to be a chef, to his inherent expectation that his wife needs nothing more than wife-dom to be happy, and finally to the rage from his abusive father that is almost never seen but lurks one too many drinks away. The point is he’s an entire, if unfinished, person, and that if he had been the focus of the film there would remain a story to tell.
Kelly MacDonald, however, is one of the underrated treasures of modern actors. She is plain-looking by the ridiculous standards of the Hollywood machine, and will never have so much as a co-starring role in a blockbuster, which is fine. She carries an inward light that could propel many more leading roles in films like this one. Stop for a moment and look at how she, as Agnes, argues with her husband, saying what’s on her mind, realizing it makes sense only to her, and refusing to explain. That is sometimes how real people are; disagreements in life aren’t written for the screen. Watching MacDonald’s face as Agnes builds a puzzle with frightening speed is more visually arresting than you might expect, even though I quite frankly think I’d find a jigsaw competition more spectator-worthy than people eating hot dogs. There is a key scene with Ziggy. He runs into her unexpectedly during a bad day, says an honest thing, and to his surprise gets an honest answer. This may be the exact moment when Agnes decides to be something like herself, and note that it comes not in an intimate moment with the attractive affair partner, or even with her husband, but with her son. How many parental relationships would be vastly improved if the parent just said “To hell with my image”?
I dearly love a film like this. It has been directed by Marc Turtletaub, who worked from a script by Oren Moverman and Polly Mann, who in turn adapted an Argentine film by Natalia Smirnoff which doesn’t seem to be available here. In moving the setting to just-outside-of-somewhere, U.S.A., the writers have shown what I consider to be deep knowledge of the way things work outside of coastally-produced sitcom worlds. Chris Norr’s camera encompasses familiar details of the sorts of scenes I am used to from “nothing towns”, and frames them in ways that give the mundane an odd beauty. All of this seems to fit Agnes. MacDonald’s likely-unheralded-at-Awards-time performance draw us into a woman whose thoughts are maybe deeper than she knows, and certainly deeper than we do.
Verdict: Highly Recommended
Note: I don’t use stars, but here are my possible verdicts. I suppose you could consider each one as adding a star.
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