Compare how vital Kelly Macdonald was to 1996’s Trainspotting with her cursory presence in
2017’s boysy sequel, and you’ll have some sense of how the British film
industry has underestimated the Scottish actress. Macdonald has always been a
supremely sympathetic performer, but her mousy air may well have become perceived
as a big-screen limitation. Never as forceful as the A-list-bound Atwell or
Winslet, she scuttled round in subservient roles (Gosford Park, Nanny McPhee),
before escaping pantry-duty via HBO’s Boardwalk
Empire: a wife part, yes, but one that proved steelier than first imagined
over that five-season run. TV arcs bend towards their own form of justice.
Puzzle, the
offbeat American indie opening this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival, finds
Macdonald tending house yet again – though here it’s an acknowledgement of
wasted potential, a corner from which her character Agnes needs to be sprung.
We join her doing the dayshift in her commuter-belt New York home, odd woman
out in a conservative bolthole lorded over by mechanic husband Louie (David
Denman) and two boisterous college-age sons. Escape comes, unexpectedly, in the
form of a jigsaw puzzle, a birthday present that gives Agnes respite from chores;
yet the gift also opens this meek denmother’s eyes to her great, long-honed facility
for putting everything in its rightful place.
The out-of-the-box story derives from The Puzzle, an Argentine drama of 2009 written and directed by
Lucrecia Martel associate Natalia Smirnoff. What the new version’s director
Marc Turtletaub and screenwriters Oren Moverman and Polly Mann presumably responded
to there was the gradual expansion of one woman’s horizons. (It seems crucial
that Agnes’s first jigsaw should form a map of the world.) Puzzling allows our
heroine welcome downtime, but also draws her outside in pursuit of bigger
challenges. Shuttling into Manhattan, she’s steered towards competitive
puzzling by cosmopolitan émigré Robert (a nicely understated Irrfan Khan), a
spiritual guru who reformulates into something more.
What follows never entirely assumes those now-familiar,
Sundance-approved indie contours. Yes, it’s a semi-quirky drama that repeatedly
returns to the sight of fully grown individuals using jigsaw puzzles as
metaphors for the way we live our lives. (“It’s a way to control the chaos,” insists
Robert.) Yet there’s even odder activity going on within these frames; they
haven’t had the haphazardness of lived experience sanded off them to better fit
a screenwriting template. Abundant religious symbolism sometimes gives Puzzle the look of a consoling matinee remake
of Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, one in
which the protagonist finds, rather than loses, themselves in patterns and
shapes.
The cast lends this quest emotional weight and complexity.
There are moments Macdonald nails out of decades-long habit: Agnes’s quiet
pride at completing a 1000-piecer, say, or her painful modesty upon meeting
Robert’s gaze. What’s new is that she also gets to assert herself: Agnes will
eventually hit Louie with a pricelessly sarcastic “I’ll get your dinner now,
dear”. Her pairing with the eternally lived-in Khan is itself an assertion of
sorts – no-one, save Turtletaub, would have thought of putting these two
together – and one complicated by Denman’s bluffly sympathetic hubby, though
it’s perhaps inevitable the latter should start sweeping completed puzzles onto
dining-room floors.
It remains as unfashionably analogue a diversion as jigsaws
themselves might be in the Fortnite era – touchingly committed to watching
flawed, lopsided humanoids attempting to tesselate – and it sometimes seems a touch
neat about recording this process. A wilder project might have gone all-in on
the competitive puzzling, where Turtletaub skirts the scene’s fringes, more compelled
by character than sensation. Yet there’s modest craft and genuine heart here,
not to mention an eye-catching centrepiece: an actress growing more certain of
herself, and more capable than ever of holding an entire picture together –
even one as unusual, and sometimes frankly as unlikely, as this.
Puzzle is now playing in selected cinemas.
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