KNIVES OUT -- dir. Rian Johnson; Daniel Craig, Michael Shannon, Jamie Lee Curtis, Chris Evans, etc. etc.

How would that pressure work? 'Meg - is there anything we can blackmail her with? C'MON MEG' and then Meg.. offers up the undocumented mother?

Grudgingly of course

Ahhh you guys fancy Meg and are looking for reasons she's not an asshole - n/m

Ignoring that last post - yeah? "Marta is going to make most of your family penniless, I know you like her, but are you really going to choose her over us?" is pretty much how that would go - like Joe Stork isn't wrong that she puts class/race over friendship, but she can do that while also being pressured into it and feeling terrible afterwards.

Not that I'm saying this is definitely what happened - I'm pushing back against Joe's definite "she isn't pressured"

My favorite line reading: Chris Evans saying "Yep" (hard p).

Points in Meg's favor: we know she's close and friends with the housekeeper Fran, to the extent that she not only knows about Fran's stash, but actually recommended vaping to her over cigarettes. Even in MA (assuming the film is up with current law), stashing and smoking pot on the job would have been a fireable offense, so clearly she had Meg's confidence. Then at the family party, Meg blows it off, only coming back late. Later, when Meg calls Marta, she's in tears, clearly distraught, and when she hangs up (upset enough that she doesn't even say goodbye), the rest of the family is literally staring at her from a couple of feet away; of course they told her to call. (For that matter, Meg is one of the few calls Marta accepts, iirc.) Now, we know Meg's mom is an asshole and crook, but there is no hint Meg knows her mom was stealing, though we do see Meg's mom manipulate her about the loss of the tuition money (without taking the blame she deserves). And then of course, at the end of the movie Meg (as far as I remember), is the only person who gives Marta a hug goodbye, and even then she's tearful as she apologizes.

Of course the movie doesn't show her being pressured to give up Marta's family status, but that's probably intentional, to keep it more ambiguous, which despite the aforementioned it is. Though it's telling that none of the others have the benefit of ambiguity. For that matter, it's also telling the Marta confided in Meg in the first place. So who knows. Fake movie person doesn't need my real defense.

The movie was fun, but I'm not sure it's worth this jesuitical untangling of the plot. With mysteries I don't care about plot.

lol Alfred, dropping another "who cares?"

the fact is that nobody went to bat for marta apart from harlan. who should have known the hell he was plunging her into tbh.

Yeah, that's the most important thing.

*reads Alfred's comments*

Yep!

I just think Meg is designed to be a wealthy young liberal who is perfectly kind to Marta and seems genuine enough in her sympathies that she gains Marta’s trust, and then when Marta becomes a threat to her own financial interests Marta’s trust in her is useful ammunition against her. She’s the most dangerous non-murderer member of the family. She feels bad about what she’s doing, but if I was going to extrapolate a little from what we’re given in the movie I’d say that she wants to have her inheritance/free education and feel like a good and righteous person, the former wins out over the latter when push comes to shove, so she seeks out absolution from Marta immediately after betraying her in a way that no one else in the family could.

Great post, otm.

Most of that is fair enough (and is indeed what I said) but "She’s the most dangerous non-murderer member of the family" is just bananas.

“Most is that” is a patient, perceptive explanation of why it’s not bananas. The others don’t have her trust.

it's not bananas it's donuts

Michael Shannon literally shows up to her house to threaten her!

What other murderers are there besides Hugh?

I just think Meg is designed to be a wealthy young liberal who is perfectly kind to Marta and seems genuine enough in her sympathies that she gains Marta’s trust, and then when Marta becomes a threat to her own financial interests Marta’s trust in her is useful ammunition against her.

i think this movie is surprisingly powerful because of how marta responds to meg. she isn't shocked in the least by how meg is responding. you get the feeling that she has already considered the depth of meg's 'sjw' convictions just by nature of what her character has already seen in life, and yet she decides to forgive marta anyway -- she sees who these people are objectively and yet decides to show them kindness. and then it seems that meg would accept 'help' from marta in the end without feeling threatened by her. the power of the movie comes from the fact that there is this potential for absolution from marta even as she becomes the boss. de armas's performance balancing those two sides, clear-eyed understanding of exactly who the family is with a deep empathy for them, is the best one in the film imo (and daniel craig was abominable). the scene between her and christopher plummer in the attic was just beautiful -- you could sense exactly the reasons they were so close and the honest tension from their different positions in life.

ugh that was confusing ... and yet she decides to forgive *meg* anyway

michael shannon was also really good i think. oh don johnson too, what a filthy performance. jamie lee curtis and toni collette were a little too broad for my taste but they had some really hilarious scenes. i was a smirk-ass and laughed at the gravity's rainbow exchange. my theater was dumb as bricks (old white utah in the richer suburbs) and no one laughed. they probably felt attacked lol.

Michael Shannon literally shows up to her house to threaten her!

With the information he got from Meg: the shared confidence is what made Meg dangerous.

What other murderers are there besides Hugh?

well, there’s Ransome

(one is enough!)

a third of my downtown multiplex audience laughed at the Pynchon gag, I was startled

shannon's mouth twitch when he first mentions his son to the detective was perfect

xxp Isn’t Michael Shannon’s leverage when he threatens Marta just Meg’s information?

too slow

Yeah, but he's also physically threatening (those close ups of menacing Shannon gripping that cane), and he's the one who weaponizes the information to threaten her family. But yeah, he gets the information from her first, sure.

he’s pathetic

In the eyes of someone of much smaller stature?

He’s a pathetic creep, but Meg knows that she can count on another family member weaponizing the information when she provides it.

michael shannon manages to exude the pathetic-ness like fine wine

He's a weiner to us because he basically earned off his dad's book and created nothing himself, but he practically has a Nazi son and is the only person of the non-murderers to confront her at her own home, choosing the one place she felt safe (the back door).

Ima wager Marta didn't think he was pathetic or non-threatening.

Tho i agree Meg posed the bigger threat by possessing the damaging information.

Some of you maybe never been threatened before IRL i take it

him going ham on ransom ('have a cookie!') was great projection.

it felt honest to me that marta was scared of him in that scene. i don't know if there's supposed to be an argument here or what i lost track.

i didn’t mean that he wasn’t threatening. he was. threatening and pathetic. the point isn’t a league table of danger the point is that meg is as on the hook as any of them, and in a particularly disappointing and creepy way.

meg is a child though, you get the impression that she might change with some growth. the others are children in old peoples' bodies, calcified and disposable wastes.

I have no reason to believe she might change with some growth--there isn't an example in this movie where someone otherwise bad surprises you with their goodness.

true

I'm also not sure it's something we're supposed to consider about her character? It sort of runs counter to Meg's function in the story; to demonstrate how someone will call out Nazis until it's their neck on the line, and then they'll leverage the same power they previously admonished.

Yea, just a jab at some of the performative woke folks really.

it's pretty obvious that meg is not marta's friend at all and that hers is the worst betrayal. i do think the fact that she said "thank you" when marta offered to keep paying for her school instead of flat-out screaming at her or w/e, plus her response that she just needed to smoke a lot of weed to forget it all, demonstrates that mostly her response is born out of unthinking childishness, immaturity and fear, that she hasn't accumulated the excuses and conscious maliciousness and "sense of the correct order of things" of her older relatives, that youth presents a slightly more innocent and malleable shade of hypocrisy. it doesn't make what she does any better, in fact it probably makes it worse, but, idk just my experience with human nature here and not the diegesis of the film or w/e, childishness when one is young (she is like 21 in the film iirc) is more likely to grow into consciousness when one is older if the steps toward independence from family happen early. all i'm saying is that her youth has a function in the film that isn't just "even people of your generation in a different class will betray you" but "there is space for change and growth in young people that there just isn't in older people who have made a long series of choices."

This is pretty cool as a piece of production trivia:

#KnivesOut subtly features art by Matt Mania, Key Grip. We had many closeups of characters with eyeglasses, so he cleverly sculpted mattes to reshape our lighting equipment into scenery you'd realistically expect to see reflected in the glasses.#NerdyFilmTechStuff pic.twitter.com/n3ZrGcEOIJ

— Steve Yedlin (@steveyedlin) December 7, 2019

that's fucking fantastic.

That's awesome. Years ago I interviewed Bill Paxton, around the time of "A Simple Plan." That was around peak Raimi but his direction was seemingly restrained, yet Paxton told me about all kinds of insane tricks shots you'd really have to pay attention to to catch.

boy this movie was a ton of fun. exactly what i wanted from this or any other "caper" movie. johnson talks about sticking a hitchcock movie in the middle of a whodunit (can't recall if that was discussed upthread) and boy does that work well to keep things exciting. did not find meg the least bit sympathetic, for all the reasons given above - our attention is specifically called to her putative allyship early on, but it's dropped like a hot potato when her fancy school tuition is cut off, and her betrayal opens the threat of the one thing marta most fears, that her family will be *fucking deported*. she's awful!

and as far as her fate, the film is generally on harlan's side: ALL of these inheritance brats (remarkably blind to their own privilege when they call other people trust-fundies) would be better off if they had to actually work for a living etc etc, so why not her?

Makes sense, but she's not even out of school yet. Maybe she would have been better written a little older, in perpetual grad school or something?

Are we ever given much of a reason why JLC in particular would be cut off? She seems to be the closest to her father, what with all the secret note writing and whatnot. Seems more like a whim of the plot than anything else.

She is also (unless I missed something) the one who is independently wealthy and had no motive for murder - her rage seemed to be Defend The Family rather than anything else.

JLC is not getting cut off, her husband is, by the threat of his infidelity being revealed

Yeah, I think when we talked about it earlier on this thread we determined that while yes, she needed a million-dollar loan from her father to start her business, she was currently independently wealthy and no longer needed him to underwrite her endeavors. Unlike Michael Shannon, or Toni Collette. And Don Johnson was perhaps the biggest asshole of all and ultimately the target of Harlan's ire.