By James David Patrick
January 29th’s National Puzzle Day seemed like a good time to celebrate our favorite movies about puzzles. With so much ground to cover, let’s dive right in and start building that border and sorting like colors.
Puzzle (Marc Turtletaub, 2018)
If watching Kelly Macdonald and Irrfan Khan put jigsaw puzzles together sounds like a solid frolick, I’ve got the movie for you. If it doesn’t—hear me out.
Kelly Macdonald has quietly carved out a career as one of the most engaging actresses of the last twenty years. She distorts her beautiful Scottish brogue (the lassy voiced Merida after all) to become Midwestern everywoman Agnes, a housewife who’s conflated her own needs and self-interests with caring for her husband Louie (David Denman) and their two teenage sons. She’s reached her forties and lacks a personal identity.
Oren Moverman and Polly Mann’s script, for all its obvious symbolism, layers subtlety within Agnes’ story. The movie opens with her decorating and cooking for a big party. She’s passing around snacks and cleaning up after guests. Only when it’s time to blow out the candles on the cake, a cake she baked and the candles she lit, do we learn that it’s Agnes’ celebration. When her drunken husband shatters a plate, she can’t help but hit pause to put the pieces back together. One’s still missing, but Louie dismisses her concerns about the plate shard. As gifts she receives a jigsaw puzzle from her aunt and an iPhone from her husband/family. It’s not that they think she’ll appreciate the device; the family wants another means through which to communicate their needs and keep tabs on her.
One afternoon, Agnes takes a rare moment to herself and puts that jigsaw puzzle together in one sitting. For the first time in the film, she’s engaged in an activity that serves no one else. When she’s done, she begins again. She puzzles so hard that she’s delinquent in fixing the family’s dinner. In every sequence, director Turtletaub reinforces that activity that puts her own needs in front of theirs, challenges that dynamic but also perceived societal norms and traditions. Having felt the natural high of puzzling (of being in control, of being even marginally selfish), Agnes secrets off on the train to New York City to find a puzzle shop and buy more puzzles, her transgression illicit. She purchases two puzzles—and it’s no coincidence that one features a classical portrait of a nude in repose. Here she notices an advertisement for a puzzler in need of a competition partner. She uses her new 21st century communications device to contact this mysterious puzzler named Robert (a remarkably charming Irrfan Khan in his last English-language film role) and embarks on a journey through puzzling and mid-day rendezvous with this enigmatic inventor and divorcee.
The film takes you down a path that feels predictable but withholds a piece of the puzzle for the final act. Puzzle’s ending might initially frustrate some viewers, but let it sit—just let it be—before jumping to criticism forged out of our own innate need to narrowly define success or character growth. Robert says one line that puts everything – her transgression, her willingness to step outside of her fate—into perspective and sets that missing piece firmly, perfectly in place.
…
So—that’s pretty much the entire run of movies using jigsaw puzzles as a central theme. Believe it or not, the puzzle hasn’t been seen as a catalyst for heart-palpitating cinema. I searched my memory and the Interwebs and came up with a few more examples that feature the hobby within a bit of character-developing, if not as a central motif.
Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
As Charles Foster Kane (Welles) grows increasingly more reclusive, withdrawing inside the walls of Xanadu, his poor wife Susan (Dorothy Comingore) idles away her hours sitting in front of a fire as large as your house, sighing heavily, and piecing together jigsaw puzzles.
The Accountant (Gavin O’Connor, 2016)
This oft overlooked Ben Affleck and Anna Kendrick thriller about a CPA with high-functioning autism who uncooks criminal financial ledgers deserves a bigger audience, so I’m happy to mention it here—even if it’s only to say that our protagonist’s aptitude for solving complex puzzles plays a role in his diagnosis and therapy.
In the Name of the Father (Jim Sheridan, 1993)
A young Irishman (Daniel Day-Lewis) is accused of a series of pub bombings and spends time in jail with a group of Jamaican prisoners who share the joys of jigsaw puzzling – when the pieces have been dipped in LSD.
When someone says they’re looking for a puzzle movie, however, they’re probably not expecting one of the above examples. It’s more than likely that they’re thinking something twisty, something that unfolds in such a way that the viewer pieces together the narrative from scattered information that the filmmaker has chosen to provide.
A puzzled cinematic narrative can be the product of filmic construction or a character’s internal state of mind and often relies on the viewer’s limited perspective. Cinema has the unique ability to constrict or release that perspective based on what the filmmakers choose to reveal at the time they choose to reveal it. Done well, these breadcrumbs—these pieces—come together to form something more exciting because the viewer has been actively engaged in the process of discovery and reconfiguration.
One of the oldest tricks in this playbook is the amnesiac protagonist. The amnesiac can’t recall anything before the moment the cameras start rolling. The audience and the character learn not only Story but identity as the narrative unfurls. It’s a common and effective device because the limitation of a character without memory provides a natural barrier to information—without the audience feeling cheated by deliberate obstruction. The device works for all genres—comedy (Desperately Seeking Susan, 1985), drama (Regarding Henry, 1991), action (Total Recall, 1990)—and arguably all could be considered a type of puzzle, but it’s really only the mystery or thriller that reinforces the imperative or timing of a solution, the ticking clock that causes sweaty palms and racing hearts.
THE AMNESIAC PUZZLES
Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000)
Guy Pearce stars as Leonard, a troubled former insurance investigator with anterograde amnesia, an affliction that prevents the patient from recording new memories after the initial trauma. Haunted by images of the brutal murder of his wife (Carrie Ann Moss), Leonard goes about assembling clues to her death. He tattoos each new piece of information onto his body, so he won’t forget or misplace everything he has learned.
Nolan unfurls the story unconventionally, using black and white sequences to denote one chronology and color sequences shown in reverse to align audience discovery with the mental capacity of our protagonist. It all starts with a Polaroid photograph of a dead man. The sequence plays in reverse, returning to its undeveloped state, thus catalyzing the dual timelines. The audience still acquires information alongside Leonard, but Nolan uses the character’s specific affliction to distort the film’s timeline.
Lest you think that Nolan exploited the condition to manipulate audience expectation, Caltech neuroscientist Christof Koch, in his book The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach, called Memento “the most accurate portrayal of the different memory systems in popular media.” The extras on the DVD even allow the viewer to play the film in chronological order to prove that Nolan didn’t use the structure as sleight of hand.
Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
David Lynch’s riddle within a mystery, a puzzle within a puzzle. Watching Mulholland Drive isn’t about putting the pieces together into a complete picture; as with many of Lynch’s films, the complete image looks different to every viewer. Therein lies Lynch’s mad genius. He gives you a tether to the commonplace. In this instance, it’s a standard framework about a young starlet (Naomi Watts) moving to Los Angeles in search of a career in show business. Upon arriving she meets a woman with amnesia (Laura Harring), and the two set out to piece together her identity. Lynch uses familiar symbols and iconography as the plot spirals into itself. Detailing more would disrupt your discovery and do a disservice to the film’s complexity.
Fair warning—one viewing might not be enough.
Using Lynch as a bridge into film as fever dream, a psychologically unsettling narrative, much like Mulholland Drive, that subverts and distorts reality. Often the films present a mystery but not a solution, leading the viewer to provide their own interpretation or final piece of the puzzle from their own frame of reference. In my mind, there’s no greater example of the fever dream than Alain Resnais’ quietly discomforting Last Year at Marienband.
THE FEVER DREAM PUZZLE
Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961)
Resnais’ film (from a script by brain-melter Alain Robbe-Grillet) explores the fallible nature of memory and burrows under your skin, at first imperceptibly before it lingers there forever. Scattered images and moments left behind, as if forgotten.
A man and a woman may or may not have met at this palatial, enigmatic chateau a year ago. They wander their chiaroscurist environment, talking, remembering, and observing the surreal details and happenings around them. It’s no more complex than that, but Resnais’ focus on specific details and deliberately haunting imagery pushes the viewer to piece together the clues of their past, to interpret Last Year at Marienbad as one might a ghost story or a murder mystery, but there’s also no way to be certain that any of the clues even matter in the first place. Some find this film infuriating—and I understand their need to find certain meaning within the text, but some movies are best left undefined and just experienced as mismatched pieces of one or many different puzzles.
Open Your Eyes (Alejandro Amenábar, 1997)
Rooted in traditional romance, science fiction, and horror genres, Open Your Eyes fragments Story into loose, dreamlike connectivity. Handsome human César (Eduardo Noriega) finds the woman of his dreams (Penélope Cruz) but then suffers a catastrophic car accident that requires extensive plastic surgery to correct his disfigurement. As Marienbad engages in a conversation about our fallible memories, Amenábar breaks down our sense of being through César’s pain and unreliable perspective. Who are we? And better yet who were we? The director and his cinematographer Hans Burrman (who also worked on Amenábar’s Tesis) sew the disparate parts together with a consistent mise en scene, the threads intentionally visible and contributing to the unsettling rifts between set pieces.
Vanilla Sky, the glossy and unremarkable 2001 American remake by Cameron Crowe undoes the magic in favor of gloss and temperate self-importance. Do not—I repeat—do not watch Vanilla Sky before Open Your Eyes. The latter’s hardly a bad film, but it can’t approach the original’s beautiful madness.
In Back to the Future II (1989), Doc rolls out a chalkboard and diagrams the movie’s three different competing timelines for Marty and the entire audience, who presumably needed a good primer about the mind-bending ramifications of meddling with the time-space continuum. Once Doc relays the basics, Back to the Future has fun with the premise, leaving it up to us to worry about the details… or not. (Narrator: “We did.”)
Then there are movies that turn the time-space apparatus into a contact sport, dwelling on the genre’s mind-bending capacity. The various temporal fractures fall into the viewers lap, begging to be assembled and made whole in one final epiphany. Time travel provides a playground for visceral thrills and engaging genre manipulation. The next two examples satisfy as actioners and twisty, puzzly time travel experiments.
TIME FRACTURED PUZZLE
Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011)
Time travel and Groundhog Day all rolled into one science-fiction thriller about a U.S. Army Captain (Jake Gyllenhaal) who believes he’s been sent into an eight-minute digital simulation of a commuter train explosion to identify the terrorist. On the train, his reflection shows the face of another man. As he tries to make sense of it all, the train explodes, killing everyone on board. He’s sent back to the train, still believing he’s being tested, and fails again. He learns he’s not navigating a simulation, but real-life scenarios, a series of train detonations, in which he’s repeatedly sent back minutes before the explosion to thwart the bomber’s plans. Though complex in execution, Duncan Jones lays out the laws of the movie without bogging it down with needless exposition. The movie embraces the concept of alternative, branching timelines and makes the most of its high-concept premise.
Déjà Vu (Tony Scott, 2006)
Tony Scott had an uncanny ability for turning absurdly high-concept nonsense into accessible and thrilling popcorn cinema. There’s probably a version of this script that dwells too long on the physics of the limited time-travel mechanic, but Tony Scott dispenses with all of that in favor of sweeping camera pans and totally unnecessary helicopter shots. Denzel Washington plays ATF agent Doug Carlin investigating the bombing of a New Orleans ferry boat. After meeting an FBI agent (Val Kilmer), he’s inducted into a special task force that can witness the past, three days prior, through a “fold” in time. Doug becomes fixated on the fate of the woman (Paula Patton) who washes up on shore, burned and mutilated, minutes before the bombing actually takes place. Through this past surveillance, Doug watches her final hours for clues to the ferry bombing and starts to get the sense that the FBI can do more than passively observe the past.
And now for the final set of puzzles, your mystery whodunnits and whatsgonnahappens, which is perhaps everyone’s favorite brand of cinematic puzzle. Playing detective and finding the killer before your protagonist gives you an inflated value of your own inner gumshoe. The best of these keep you guessing and assembling the misshapen pieces until the final reveal. There are so many from which to choose, but here are two of my personal favorites… and they don’t always need a central murder to get the blood pumping… but it usually helps.
THE TWISTY MYSTERY PUZZLE
The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946)
Everyone wants to know if The Big Sleep makes sense. No—not really, but it doesn’t matter either. Do you watch movies to be entertained? Or to perform post-mortems? Howard Hawks intentionally convolutes the film to keep the forward momentum hurtling towards a conclusion at the speed of Bogie and Bacall’s. The wealthy General Sternwood hires famed private detective Philip Marlowe to tend to “the matter” of his youngest daughter. The labyrinthine plot should satisfy any amateur sleuth and the star wattage on screen can’t be imitated or eclipsed. You’ll be hooked the moment that General Sternwood asks Humphery Bogart how he likes his brandy.
The Spanish Prisoner (David Mamet, 1997)
Corporate espionage has never been so thrilling. I’m pretty sure that’s no hyperbole. David Mamet’s cracking dialogue fuels a plot about a man (Campbell Scott) that invents a financial formula worth billions of dollars and finds himself at the center of a moral hurricane. It’s a con-artist yarn told with deliberate ambiguity and the misdirection of a movie magician. (And no surprise—the late, great Ricky Jay finds a way into Mamet’s entourage.) We never learn the nature of what was invented because it doesn’t matter. What matters is that someone (multiple someones, perhaps) wants the formula and will do just about anything to get it. Mamet sends us down dead-ends and wayward cul-de-sacs before ultimately arriving at the inevitable truth (or is it?). The terrific cast, rounded out with Steve Martin, Ben Gazzara, a masterful Rebecca Pidgeon, and Ed O’Neill spin a web of intrigue, selling the shenanigans without betraying the delirious and delicious high-minded nonsense.
James David Patrick is a Pittsburgh-based writer with a movie-watching problem. He has a degree in Film Studies from Emory University that, much to everyone’s dismay, gives him license to discuss Russian Shakespeare adaptations at cocktail parties. He hosts the Cinema Shame and #Bond_age_Pod podcasts. You’ll find him crate diving at local record shops. James blogs about movies, music and ‘80s nostalgia at www.thirtyhertzrumble.com. Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.