Walt and Toni had been told that they weren’t going to get to keep suckling at Harlan’s teat, but I think they probably still thought they’d be comfortably taken care of once he died with their “fair share” of his estate. They were clearly shocked at the reading of the will, unlike Ransom who had been told flat out that he wasn’t getting anything once Harlan died.
Linda did have her own successful real estate business, started with a million dollars of seed money from Harlan. It’s unclear whether that was a loan that was paid back, but it does undermine a bit of the “self-made person” mystique that all of the sponging relatives seemed to promote.
That was just to (barely) satisfy the standard stipulation that Daniel Craig puts in all his contracts that at some point during the movie he has to get partly or wholly undressed.
One character says something to the effect of “Geez, the old guy lives in a CLUE board!”
Just saw it last night. Glad it was so much fun; I convinced the wife to go based on this thread. She was impressed by Craig, and also Johnny Storm (what’s his real name? He’s one of those Chrises…). She’d only seen him as Cap’n America.
Yes. That’s the joke. I didn’t literally laugh out loud the first time I heard one (and then another) of his children casually announce themselves as “self-made”, but I came pretty close. There was a certain mirthfulness to the succeeding exhale.
Now, to be fair, Linda really had made something of the running start her father gave her, but it does seem a fairly adept, if overt, social commentary on how people tend to overlook their own privilege (even if we just now limit it to “economic” privilege) in assessing their achievements. There was a lot of that in this film—not so subtle social commentary. And yet it was enjoyable, because the narrative was well-crafted, coherent, and sustained my interest throughout. Unlike, say, The Last Jedi.
Something that might be very simple, but after watching the film and discussing it with my friend and checking it around, I haven’t really got it: why reinjecting anything? Wasn’t enough with the switching of the bottle tags? It got me thinking even during the movie, because I felt it wasn’t clear enough…
I didn’t get the idea that she’d told at some point during the proceedings; more like she had mentioned it earlier, between finding out and the movie. It’s the kind of thing that could be mentioned while talking politics; she and Hippie-Leech could have been talking about The Horrors Of Immigration Politics for example and she dropped “yeah, I mean, look at Marta’s mom, she’s undocumented and blahblahyadda”.
Evans, and yeah, he’s a good actor, even if the pretty face tends to be distracting from the actual, you know, acting.
Ransom didn’t switch the bottle tags. He emptied each bottle into a syringe and reinjected the contents into the other bottle. (Not sure how you could cleanly remove and replace the bottle tags or labels.)
On reflection, Ransom should have just killed Marta first and then Harlan (or both together in a fire or car crash or something). It would probably be a lot easier to contest Harlan’s will (or at least come to a quick settlement with Marta’s mom) if Marta had died in an “accident”.
Of course Ransom could have done other things, but what he did was arrange for what he thought as a foolproof way to ensure that he got his inheritance, by making the one who was bound to get it appear to be the most responsible for the death. He just didn’t count on that darn nurse, so good at her job that she could tell the difference between one liquid concoction and another just by feel (and yet, somehow, careless enough to inject a substance into someone’s arm without even bothering to glance at the label—a very narrow margin of failure indeed).
We could discuss the finer points of how Ransom might have gone about his scheme, but then we’d be discussing a different movie—a movie that Rian Johnson might have made, but didn’t. With that said, I think it’s fair to assume, given the movie Johnson did make, that even if Ransom had come up with a different scheme, he still would have been caught in the end by a grizzled, yet somewhat quirky investigator who teamed up with some plucky, downtrodden, and ultimately innocent young person.
It wouldn’t be Scooby Doo if Scooby didn’t show up with those darn kids and keep the villain from getting away with it all.
Well, if we’re going to go *that *route, where we’re not debating what Ransom could/should have done (if Ransom was a real person and not a fictional character) but what would have made a good entertaining movie, I stand by my earlier comment that what I would have liked is more over-the-top black comedy in which every family member has been trying to kill Harlan but the person who actually succeeds is Marta, purely by accident. The big twist is that Blanc figures this out but decides he’d rather keep quiet and let Marta inherit everything because she’s the only decent person in the household. You could even keep the ending with her sipping from the “My House, My Rules” mug with a hint of ambiguity that maybe it wasn’t an accident after all.
Honestly, I thought Ransom’s method made perfect sense. That it failed was because it had to, not necessarily because it was a bad plan on its face. I’m just really not super interested in talking about all the various ways in which plots Johnson didn’t choose might still have failed (and may or may not have been more prone to failures).
The 100% fatal car accident, for instance has the problem that (1) it’s maybe not so easy to cause a car to crash in a single-vehicle collision and yet definitely kill everyone inside, (2) there is, as you note, still the problem of Marta’ heirs having a claim to the money, which could perhaps be dealt with through coercion and threats, but next thing you know some SJW (a real SJW, not just some liberal elite wannabe who doesn’t have the stomach for it like his cousin) gets involved and the case drags on for years, and (3) not that he knew it, but his neo-nazi cousin overheard the argument about the inheritance, so if both Harlan and his unknown-to-all-but-Ransom heir had ended up dead together, that sure would have looked suspicious for Ransom. And even without knowing that someone DEFINITELY overheard key parts of the conversation, Ransom must have known others knew he had an argument. So he would have been the prime suspect, absent Marta with her finger on the needle.
And I’m sure you can come back and counter all of those points (a not all inclusive list of reasons why a car accident, for example, might be a bad plan) I just made, or point out ways in which the OD idea was an even worse idea, but, again, how much effort to we really want to expend discussing a movie that didn’t happen and wasn’t made, with imaginary facts that we don’t have access to?
I say again, I thought—and still think—that Ransom’s chosen method made perfect sense, and had as much “right” to succeed as any other reasonably conceivable murder plot, if not more. I don’t see the need to re-write the Knives Out for Rian Johnson anymore than I feel the need to come up with contrived or retconned explanations for why certain parts of The Last Jedi that apparently made no sense somehow actually make perfect sense if only you assume certain facts that the writer/director himself didn’t bother to incorporate into the story he chose to tell, but maybe made it into the novelization as a one line (and obviously contrived) explanation for something. God I hate Last Jedi…
And I don’t disagree; it was everything Ransom did afterward that made no sense. I can picture him talking to Marta to learn what had actually happened, but once he finds out that she blames herself for Harlan’s death, he should have backed off immediately, not doubled down by killing the housekeeper, quadrupled down by confessing to killing the housekeeper, nor infinity-downed by trying to stab Marta in front of two cops and a detective.
I think this would have undermined one of Johnson’s key storytelling priorities–that unlike Agatha Christie mysteries (where we rarely get to know the victim and the suspects are on equal footing so game for scrutiny), he portrays Marta as a profoundly sympathetic figure–even before he does the bait & switch and we’re led to conclude she’s the accidental killer.
Having all the characters try to kill Harlan immediately turns the film into a farce, and that completely unroots it from a reality where we care about the end result. Marta stops being a person with real problems and becomes just another piece in a self-indulgent theatrical where the director bends over backwards showing how clever he is. That might have been “fun” but also probably a bit boring and not something that would be worth revisiting. Does anyone really care about any of the characters in Orient Express, for example? Their motive is eventually revealed as rooted in anguish but while the execution of the twist may have been a genuinely clever one at the time, Poirot becomes a mouthpiece for the emotion channelling the longing for justice because we don’t see much of it in the suspects themselves.
What Johnson has achieved here is easy to take for granted for its degree of difficulty. I loved Columbo mysteries, but we were always invested in having the bad guy go down, especially due to their arrogance. They were easy foils. Positioning the suspect as someone we “know” did it and balancing the mystery with our hopes of her somehow getting away with it is both incredibly clever but also very human in painting her with more dimensions than the genre usually affords. Who knows if Johnson could repeat the effort if this were to become a modest franchise, but I would certainly like to find out.
I meant what Dewey Finn described, although at some moment it looked too like he also covered one tag with another one (I remember the image of the second tag being removed), and that “double process” is the one that confused me so much…
The wife and I watched it yesterday afternoon. Loved it. One question though. In that last shot of the family standing outside looking up at Marta, was the old lady with them? I hope she was still inside, with Marta planning to care for her.
Well, we can agree to disagree one what makes a movie entertaining. I enjoyed Kind Hears and Coronets a lot more than the two or three versions of Murder on the Orient Express I’ve seen over the years. I can enjoyed a black comedy a lot more than a convoluted mystery, especially one that relies on the rather unlikely contrivance of a character who has her own built-in lie detector.
I’m a bit late to the party, having just seen the movie, but I had a couple of sticking points I’m not clear on.
I don’t remember Marta getting close enough to Harlan’s body to get any blood splashed on her shoe, so how did that happen?
If Marta was so familiar with the drugs to be able to identify them by slight differences in color or viscosity, wouldn’t she have realized that the contents had been switched, or at least have checked everything again?
IANA pharmacist, but why would the packaging and labeling of a dangerous drug like morphine be so very similar to a standard drug?
I think it was that she DID correctly identify them by sight/weight. That’s why she didn’t give him a fatal OD. But when she saw the labels, then she got confused. She doubted herself. And once you get yourself crossed up like that, it’s hard to straighten it out, especially when death is on the line.
Yes. That’s why I thought she would have then looked at the full vial labeled [regular drug] and perhaps noticed it didn’t look/feel like what she was accustomed to and realized something was amiss and taken the time to sort it out.