I know, but somebody had to tell her that she wasn’t welcome.
I think they just forgot to invite Marta to the funeral, and Linda and Walt threw the rest of the family under the bus, saying they were outvoted, when no vote had been taken. They remembered Marta after the fact, and came up with an excuse (“outvoted”) to cover their asses. Walt and Linda are the ones who would have had the say so about Marta being there. It’s very likely they just forgot. They probably didn’t think to invite the long-time housekeeper either.
And yeah, I’m sure Harlan knew where Marta’s family came from. He was a good man.
My point wasn’t that Harlan knew specifically what Ransom was going to do, but he deliberately antagonized Ransom with the news that Marta would inherit everything in the hope that Ransom would do something incriminating. It would be crazy to reveal such a change in his will while leaving his ex-heirs time to concoct a plan to interfere - therefore he was planning on killing himself anyway. The apparent mixup just complicated things a bit so he had to improvise the plan with Marta. Harlan may or may not have realized that he did not get the fatal dose of morphine, but that knowledge wasn’t going to change his suicide.
IMDB says he hit the piano key when he wanted the police to ask what time the interviewee arrived at the party. I don’t remember well enough to confirm…
Ransom knew the tox report didn’t implicate Marta because of the story she told him. Prior to that, it’s possible he was prepared to have Marta killed off in an apparent suicide if need be, but as he knew the details of the story (that Marta had switched the switch and so Harlan did not OD), he instead arranged a plan by which, no matter what (assuming he wasn’t found out as the real architect of the incident, that is), he would inherit. Either Marta would hide the evidence of her involvement in the events leading to Harlan’s death and inherit, in which case she would give Ransom his share, or she would be “found out” (she, but not Ransom) and would lose everything, in which case Ransom would get his share under the previous will.
If on the other hand, as you ponder, Ransom had murdered Marta straight away, with or without the tox report pointing to her guilt and with or without clear evidence of Harlan OD’ing, he’d have lost a valuable witness that would have pointed more than anyone to her guilt and/or civil liability: Marta herself. Because she couldn’t lie (at least not effectively, and not in the long term). As an absolute last ditch, he could have just asked her directly, ostensibly out of concern for her and her well-being, if she was holding back anything. He could have even insisted that she would be “taken care of” no matter what, as many of the other family members did, even if she’d made an “honest mistake” and “Oh, Marta, I can see this is torturing you. Please, I promise I can forgive you, won’t you tell me if you’re holding something back? Just let us put our beloved father/grandfather at rest. We know you’d never have done anything intentionally to harm him.” water works
Anyways, we were clearly meant to suspect Ransom from the beginning just based on his early departure from the party and his late arrival in the narrative. I maintained my suspicion throughout as I realized that he had “white knighted” himself into a scenario by which, no matter what happened to Marta and his own family, he would get his inheritance. Which is awfully suspicious, don’t you think? The one guy guaranteed to benefit by the binary scenario he’s laid out for Marta, under (very gentle) threat of torture (the whole bowl full of chili followed by an interrogation thing).
Wouldn’t work. As soon as she said she stepped out of the room she’d throw up.
Blanc says that, but they could have gone with a simpler explanation. The drugs are in Marta’s bag; she’s the only one who handles them. Since she gives him morphine very rarely, and only a small dose, that vial would be nearly full. The Ketorolac is more likely to be empty, or nearly so.
All the family members were scheming, lying jerks, except Jamie Lee Curtis. She started her business with a loan[sup]*[/sup] from Harlan… I don’t remember her claiming to have been a self-made woman, or of telling any other big lies during the movie. I’m not entirely clear on why Harlan would cut her out of his will along with all the rest; she seems to have taken the start that he gave her and done okay with it.
There’s one other thing that nags at me a bit. When Marta is about to confess to the family what happened, Blanc is behind her and looks at the toxicology report. That’s when he pieces the whole thing together and stops her. But later, when he’s explaining everything Ransom did and why, doesn’t he say that none of them know how to read a toxicology report? Everyone (at various times) expects the report to say one thing or another, but none of them know what the numbers in it really mean. So why did looking at the report give Blanc the donut hole inside the donut-hole hole?
- I don’t recall if it was a loan or a gift to get her started. I suppose it’s implied that she didn’t pay him back.
I believe because it was the first time that anyone noticed that Harlan did not have any morphine in him. Everyone assumed Marta’s story was true - that she accidentally overdosed Harlan, and everything came from that. But that didn’t explain who hired Blanc, or why, and so there was still a mystery. All the facts were up in gravity’s rainbow, but it wasn’t until Blanc learned that Harlan did NOT have an overdose that he knew where to stand to catch the truth, as it were.
Knowing that Harlan was not overdosed, and if you believe Marta was telling the truth, then there was only one explanation that fit all the facts, and that was that Ransom switched the vials to kill Harlan and frame Marta. That one fact spun every piece of the puzzle into their proper place all at once.
But Blanc says later that none of them knew how to read a toxicology report.
Good point, I’d forgotten that. Of course, around this point, a really smart person would back away, contact their lawyer and not talk to anyone (especially the police) about it. Torching the lab was a heck of a risk, but at that stage Marta genuinely believed she had killed Harlan (or at least crated the situation that drove him to suicide), so destroying exculpatory evidence might be worth taking the chance, but after that, just settle in for a long court battle. Certainly don’t blurt out that you tried to kill the housekeeper or try to stab the nurse in front of witnesses. Jeez…
Actually, I can see one of the family members approaching Marta after the will-reading and saying “Look, by cutting us out entirely, Harlan’s left us with nothing to lose, so we could drag this out for years through the court system. I suggest you take half of the cash and the home and a significant minority position in the publishing house, which Walt can continue to run. Divide up the rest among us and we’ll sign whatever documents we need to give up any future claims. If Walt’s right about movie and TV adaptations of Harlan’s work being worth a lot of money down the road, the publishing house will be worth a lot more and perhaps we can negotiate to buy out your share in the future. Meantime, you’ll have this house and about $30 million and you won’t have to deal with us for several years at least. Or take the home and the cash and give us the publishing house, and we can go our separate ways right now.”
Yeah, I got that dosage info mixed up in my head. So the dose for the Toradol was actually wrong in the opposite direction - 100mg is too large of a dose. The maximum recommended dose is like 30 mg for IV: Ketorolac dosing, indications, interactions, adverse effects, and more
According to the doctor I saw the movie with Harlan would be basically incapacitated withing a minute of taking that large a morphine dose IV. Think of all of the heroin shooting scenes in other movies - it would be like that. So Marta probably should have noticed that it probably wasn’t morphine if he was able to spin complicated plans. I suppose we just have to chalk that up to her being frantic.
In order to do that, one of the family members would have to see Marta as a real person, worth dealing with as an equal. It was very clear that none of them could conceive of her as anything more than a servant. They could no more engage with her rationally than they could bring Harlan back to life.
Besides which, all of them had gone in an instant from being comfortably wealthy to destitute. That’s a real shock to the system when you’re a rich white asshole. Ransom had a night to get used to it; he’d been warned that he was being cut out of the will anyway, and had a scheme in place. For the rest of them it was like falling out of a plane.
Well, Walt and Toni (the daughter-in-law) got some advance warning that they were being cut off. I don’t recall if Linda had independent wealth (wasn’t she a realtor or something?) but her cheating husband Morris was aware of the threat to cut him off from her wealth and by extension Harlan’s.
But you’re right that none of them (except maybe the liberal-arts granddaughter Katherine, and possibly not even her) saw Marta as anything more than an employee.
Katherine knew that she was supposed to see Marta as something other than a wage slave from “lesser stock” (my words), but *never really internalized it. She was a caricature of the liberal elite we had a thread about not too long ago. The problem wasn’t so much that she was liberal, elite, or liberal and elite, but that she was a hypocrite who, in addition to being insulated from the true consequences of the rhetoric she put forth by social prejudices in her favor, also actively sought to extend her privilege when push came to shove.
*It’s also possible she did internalize it and did see Marta as no less worthy than herself, but lacked the courage of her convictions. But then, lack of courage doesn’t really explain how/why she (however reluctantly on the surface) gave up what she knew about Marta’s mom to the rest of the family. So I’m going with “hypocrite” who somehow manages to sleep at night just by telling herself “I’m not a bad person, I’m just not as brave as some others.”
Yes, that’s what I mean.
Everybody that cares believes Marta’s story. No one involved has read and recognized the significance the report, including Ransom, but now he knows what it WILL say, because of Marta’s private confession. Blanc is the first independent to understand what the report means - that Marta did not give a fatal OD.
If Marta did not give a fatal OD that means one of two things - she made a mistake the fatal night, and really did give the right bottle and got all crossed up in the panic, or she actually did pick the wrong bottle by label, but she picked the right bottle by content because of skill - she could tell just by the look which was which. Blanc proved that the second was true with the test in the study.
So if she accidentally picked the morphine bottle, but did not give an OD, that means somehow the actual contents of the bottles were switched. And who had access? Blanc knew everyone’s story and where they said they were. The one that didn’t fit was Ransom’s.
Knowing that the tox report would show no morphine, Ransom had to switch gears and actually protect Marta instead of framing her. Blanc didn’t learn that until after the slow speed car chase.
The original plan was Ransom would frame Marta for the “accidental” OD, whether is was ruled murder or negligence, either way she would not inherit. Ransom hired Blanc to “find the truth” and uncover Marta’s “crime”. When Marta confessed to Ransom that she actually made a mistake (and he knew she wasn’t lying) he was sunk. It would be ruled a suicide, and Mart would inherit.
All these pieces were in the air, and the tox report was the final piece that made everything fit. To a mind like Blanc’s, the whole puzzle solved itself right in front of him all at one. Like when Adrian Monk gets the final piece, and the smile comes over his face. they both know that THAT is the one true solution.
While I agree that this is how it was presented (and appreciate your excellent summary of how Blanc figured it out), I’m now wondering about this part.
Wouldn’t it be possible for the family to claim that Marta’s confessed mix-up caused Harlan to commit suicide? That is, that her telling Harlan that he was about to die of an overdose caused him to kill himself. Even though she was wrong, I’m not sure there was any hard evidence that could show that the contents of the vials were switched rather than Marta just got the vials mixed up. So her negligence (twice, if you count not having the antidote) caused his death.
If Ransom just plays dumb and lawyers up I think there’s still a chance he gets off, especially since the housekeeper ended up dying and couldn’t finger him. And that the family gets the inheritance back through the slayer rule.
I suppose that’s why Marta faking the housekeeper’s survival was so critical - that’s the moment Ransom knows he’s well and truly fucked.
Other than Ransom trying to stab Marta. 
I like your point, and with enough money the family could drag probate out forever.
But the only one of them who has money is Linda, because she has her own company.
ISTM that everyone thought it was (supposed to be) a big problem that the toxicology report, and later the lab, were destroyed and/or unavailable.
In real life, someone had to prepare said report and he or she could easily be located and deposed to determine what the report said. It would be possible, I suppose, that they might not remember if they’d done a lot of reports but it seems unlikely.
Are you willing to entertain a hypothetical question based on the movie? So at the end, Marta has $60 million but her mother is an undocumented alien. Is there anything that really good lawyers can do to allow her mother to stay in the US? Or would she have to leave the US, even if only for a short time?
Well, with $60 million, Marta can set her mother up in luxury in her home country, be it Uruguay or Paraguay or Brazil or Mesopotamia or whatever. Marta’s mom might get barred from the U.S. but can move to probably anywhere else on Earth and live in comfort.