Mark Reviews Movies: PUZZLE (2018)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 26, 2018

Puzzle is the story of a woman who has gone unappreciated for so long that she no longer even appreciates herself. In the film's opening scenes, Agnes (Kelly Macdonald) is preparing for a birthday party at her home. Everything must be in order and cleaned. She vacuums, sets up the decorations, and bakes a cake. The party is going well, although Agnes looks more like a maid in this house than part of a celebration in her own home, considering how she tends to the guests' needs and barely exchanges any words with people.

We assume that this is a party for her husband Louie (David Denman), since all of the guests seem to know him better than they know Agnes. He's the center of attention, while Agnes gets drinks and cleans up plates. Then, it's time for the cake. Agnes brings it out to the living room and sets it down on the table near where Louie is standing. As the crowd sings the traditional song, they get to the part where the name is inserted, and it comes as a shock to hear Agnes' name accompanying the descending two notes.

There's such pity for Agnes in this moment that we don't know whether to laugh at the absurdity of the situation or to shed a tear for this woman's miserable existence. If she were happy, that would be one thing, but happiness clearly has left Agnes' life some time ago. Her life is dominated by her roles as a wife to Louie and a mother to her two sons.

The extent of those roles—as her husband and older son work at Louie's auto garage, while the younger son is finishing up high school—is a lot of household chores, running errands, and waiting for the men to come home. She breaks up a couple days of the week with volunteer work at the local Catholic church, but otherwise, her life is a series of routines and thankless meal-preparation. At night, she lies in bed awake, listening to the sound of Louie's snoring, and counts down the seconds in the morning before the alarm clock buzzes.

Agnes is barely a person at the film's start. She's a vessel for fulfilling her family's basic needs, and for the most part, her husband and sons treat her as such. Louie needs her as his own alarm clock and expects that breakfast and dinner will be waiting for him when he wants them. Gabe (Austin Abrams), the younger son, barely acknowledges his mother's existence, since he's so caught up in plans for after high school and with a girlfriend (played by Liv Hewson). Only Ziggy (Bubba Weiler), the elder son, offers help with the cooking and the dishes. He seems attuned to what Agnes is going through in a way that even she might realize.

Oren Moverman and Polly Mann's screenplay (based on Natalia Smirnoff's 2009 Argentine film of the same name) does its own routine in showing us just how meaningless Agnes' life is, but it's Macdonald's performance that provides the sense of some spark just beneath the surface of the character's monotonous existence. Agnes might not see a way out of this way of life, but Macdonald offers glimpses of how this character has endured for all these years—in the little game of anticipating the alarm and the little smile when the men of the house offer the same response to her telling them that it's time to wake up.

The story emerges after the birthday party, when Agnes opens and breezes through a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle that was given to her as a gift. Finding a sense of accomplishment in the task, she takes a train from her suburban home to New York City to a specialty shop to buy another puzzle. There's a flyer from a man looking for a partner with whom to do puzzles. Thinking she's pretty good at doing puzzles (It turns out that she's great at them), Agnes responds to the pamphlet and winds up teaming up with Robert (Irrfan Khan), a recently divorced man of wealth who lucked out on a single invention, for an upcoming national tournament.

That's about the extent of the story, as Agnes and Robert have three-times-weekly practice sessions, while she tries to keep her visits a secret from her family. There are certain inevitabilities to such a straightforward story: Agnes will discover herself and grow more independent as she spends more time with puzzles and Robert, Louie will have to find out one way or another and try to keep her from doing what she wants, and Agnes and Robert's relationship will develop into something more than a shared hobby. What keeps the material from feeling overly familiar, though, is the attention to detail in Agnes and Louie's troubled marriage, as well as the sense that Agnes and Robert's bonding is about something more than a possible romance. He opens her eyes to new ways of looking at the world and at herself.

The majority of the film's success is in how well Macdonald plays Agnes' growth into her own person and struggle to determine if her family, as it currently exists, still fits into this newly forming version of herself. Her performance doesn't just keep Puzzle together. It provides the film with a genuine sense of internal conflict, of blossoming revelation, and of seeing this character transform into a person of her own making.

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