When You Know You’ve Made All The Right Choices
Marc Turtletaub’s Puzzle (2018)
I think the best moments in movies are when it’s a cold, gloomy, rainy Sunday afternoon, and you decide to roll the dice on an independent movie at The Ritz based solely on the poster. You’re usually in there with a few other people, frequently older couples who smuggled in some sandwiches, perhaps also using the cozy embrace of the theater to get out of the elements. The theater runs through its usual collection of foreign language trailers, which often only serve as a great ‘wait… wasn’t he in that other thing?’ game that is guaranteed to torture you for the rest of the movie until you can safely put your mind to rest with some solid online sleuthing.
But it’s these moments, these trips to the theater, these leaps of faith literally into the darkness, that can turn up some of the best moviegoing moments in film. Marc Turtletaub’s Puzzle (2018) is for me one such movie. A remake of an original Argentine independent movie of the same name from 2010, in it we spend time with bored housewife Agnes, beautifully played by the often overlooked but wonderful Kelly Macdonald (Trainspotting, Brave, Boardwalk Empire). Agnes is consumed with the menial tasks of running a household for her unappreciative family, but every so often we get a glimpse of an internal brilliance, and a hint that she’s capable of much more than making sure dinner is on the table every night.
She receives a jigsaw puzzle as a gift, and the fuse gets lit. Instead of spending her day on the chores of the home, she spends it solving, and re-solving an enormous jigsaw puzzle. It consumes her mentally, but energizes her, and we see her at her most alive, her most in flow. The puzzle is literally live-giving to her, and she thrives and delights at her capacity to solve the puzzle swiftly and methodically. But her triumph over the puzzle, and the temporary victory over the mundane is short-lived when an argument breaks out over why dinner isn’t ready when the family comes home. As her unappreciative husband reminds her ‘puzzles are for children, Agnes’.
Inspired by her experience, she fakes an unwell aunt, and travels to Manhattan for the day in order to visit a puzzle store downtown. Against every introverted characteristic, here she responds to an ad, ‘Champion desperately seeking puzzle partner’. The champion who seeks is Robert (Irrfan Khan, Life of Pi, Slumdog Millionaire, The Darjeeling Limited), a brilliant engineer, and the two strike up a friendship based on their mutual love of solving the most difficult puzzles in the shortest space of time. The friendship blossoms as Agnes continues to pursue her relationship with Robert in secret, and suspicions grow at home. Inevitably the friendship becomes much more, and on the morning of the national championships, their romance becomes physical.
I’ll not share more, as the end is a tender, heartfelt place for Agnes to take us, but her treatment is a wonderful, fitting, hopeful letter to her future independence and optimistic, creative spirit. Underneath it all is Dustin O’Halloran’s incredible score, and as the credits take Agnes away from us, Ane Brun’s vocals take us to a place with her we never want to come back from, a soaring future filled with hope. The vocalization track is called ‘Horizons’, the perfect name for where we say goodbye to Agnes. She lifts us up, and the song is the perfect complement.
I’ve thought a lot about Puzzle ever since I first saw it on a rainy Sunday at The Ritz back in 2018. I’ve since watched it several times at home, and I often listen to the soundtrack while I’m studying. There’s something very special about this small tale of creative bravery in breaking from the mundane and just pursuing what you really want to do in life. Agnes doesn’t always get it right, but she comes to realize that she’s a lot more powerful than she thought she was, or that her loved ones believed she was. She finally hears her inner voice and thrives before our eyes, first with Robert as her champion and cheerleader, but far beyond that on her own in the end.
So the moral of the story here is that the best moments in the movies are the ones you least expect. When you just go to the theater and let the wind take you to the screen that feels the best. We live in a world of easter eggs, teasers, post-credits reveals, premier access, spoilers, reaction videos, frame-by-frame analysis, expanded universes and trailer by troll. In many instances watching the trailer is enough. Everything around the viewing experience, especially at home, is so managed, that actively resisting it can feel like a real breath of rebellious fresh air. For me, Puzzle was one of hundreds of experiences like this, and when smaller cinemas open up safely again, I can’t wait to see where the posters will take me next.
