In one of the few lyrical stretches of Puzzle, Marc Turtletaub’s sensitive and sad new drama, Agnes (the perpetually unappreciated Kelly Macdonald) rides a New York subway car while a blind man stands in the center and sings “Ave Maria” in a plaintive falsetto. Not long after, Agnes is served tea by a woman named Maria, and she points out the oddity that the namesake of Schubert’s piece is now providing her with a beverage. Her tea-drinking companion is unmoved, dismissing the parallel as an act of mere randomness that carries no cosmic significance. Agnes remains unconvinced: “It has to mean something.”
Does it, though? Given the sheer size of the universe, I’m inclined to agree with her partner and hesitate to ascribe any meaning to such an apparent coincidence. But it’s hard to blame Agnes, seeing as her own, private search for meaning is the animating force behind Puzzle, a movie about a seemingly stock figure who suddenly resolves to discover more of herself, and of the world. It’s also hard not to turn the question around and aim it at Puzzle itself. This is an unusually gentle and well-observed film, with a peculiar attention to its central characters and their rhythmic dynamics, but what does it really mean?
Perhaps what it stands for most of all is the proposition that Kelly Macdonald should appear in more movies. Ever since bursting onto the indie scene two decades ago in Trainspotting (“If I’m prepared to take a chance, I might just get to know the inner you.”), the Scottish actress has periodically turned up to elevate Best Picture nominees (Gosford Park, Finding Neverland, No Country for Old Men) with her unassuming intelligence and grace. But outside of the excellent HBO original The Girl in the Café (plus a buzzy episode of Black Mirror), she’s rarely received the opportunity to play leads. That’s a shame, because as she showcases here, Macdonald is a beautifully restrained performer, relying on minute facial gestures and carefully modulated tonal changes to fashion a character of far greater depth than the script (by Polly Mann and Oren Moverman) might have suggested.
That script is efficient, though, and while Turtletaub could fairly be accused of directing like a producer (this is only his second feature—he remains best known for producing Little Miss Sunshine), in a handful of sharp opening scenes, he briskly establishes Agnes’ meager circumstances. Not that she’s poor; she and her husband, Louie (David Denman), own a comfortable home in suburban New York, where they live with their two sons: Ziggy (Bubba Weiler), a twentysomething loaf who works with Louie in the body shop he runs, and Gabe (Austin Abrams, last seen fleeing Keri Russell’s sedan on The Americans), a high school senior who is theoretically working on his college applications. Like the rest of us, Agnes and Louie worry about money, but they’re less concerned about whether they can pay the mortgage than whether they need to finance Gabe’s education by selling that lakeside cabin they’ve been using for years as a vacation spot.
Yet while Agnes may be relatively secure, she is by no means fulfilled. Her daily life is one of absolute routine: doing laundry, buying groceries, cooking dinner. She is utterly immune to surprise, such that she can often predict exactly what her husband and children will say before they say it. She seems to take some pride in her quiet mastery of her home—watch the smile that slowly plays across her lips as she wakes up in the morning—but like many mothers, her contributions go largely unacknowledged. (As an ode to the concept of the taken-for-granted mom, Puzzle might make a fine double feature with Tully.) Even when locals gather at her house to celebrate her birthday, she still has to light the candles and bring out the cake herself.
As tends to happen at the movies, things change. Sifting through her variously banal birthday gifts, Agnes comes upon a complex jigsaw puzzle, which she assembles swiftly and perfectly. Taking satisfaction in the accomplishment, she travels to a board-game store in the city, where she spies a curious advertisement: “champion desperately seeking puzzle partner.” Whether because she’s restless at home or because she’s weirdly hooked on the process of puzzling, she answers the ad—in characteristically modest fashion, her text message reads, “I think I might be good at this”—and finds herself retaking the train to Manhattan, where she meets… a wizard!
OK, not really. But the man she does meet, a former inventor named Robert (played with an impish twinkle by Irrfan Khan), might as well be a mythical figure, given the air of enchantment that surrounds him. Robert is everything Agnes is not: intellectual, worldly, direct to the point of rudeness. He is also a veteran of the competitive puzzling circuit, which means that he’s yet another man who tells Agnes what to do (sort the pieces by color, stand up to gain a bird’s-eye view, etc.). But Agnes proves to be a more intuitive thinker, and the plain tension between her and Robert—in terms of both their specific puzzle-solving philosophies and their generally clashing personalities—is designed to serve as the film’s central dramatic hook.
It doesn’t work; despite nuanced work from both actors, the relationship between Agnes and Robert represents Puzzle at its most false. It makes some sense, in the abstract, for Agnes to find herself drawn to this mysterious stranger, who burns like a beacon in her otherwise colorless world. But Robert is too obvious a counterpoint to function as a legitimate character, and the connection between the two—a slowly gestating emotional affair that eventually progresses into a physical one—lacks the genuine chemistry it requires.
More problematic is the initial foundation for their partnership. The task of completing a jigsaw puzzle is not exactly a thrilling activity, and whether Turtletaub lacks the interest or the facility, he fails to convey Agnes’s geometric gifts with any visual clarity or flair. Instead, he simply supplies countless shots of Agnes decisively connecting pieces together, relying on Macdonald’s face (which, to be fair, says a lot) and your own assumptions to suggest that she is cleverly solving a problem. He also resorts to some silly ideological juxtaposition; Robert, for all his bookish smarts, is revealed to be a stick-in-the-mud traditionalist, whereas Agnes uses outside-the-box strategies to gain a competitive advantage. It might work if we had any idea what those strategies actually were, but for Turtletaub, the mere suggestion of intellectual rebellion qualifies as bona fide genius.
Yet while Puzzle feels artificial when its characters are actually solving puzzles, it is far more compelling when it returns to the ostensibly dreary confines of Agnes’ home life, in particular her marriage. From Belle de Jour to Unfaithful, cinema is replete with tales of neglected housewives seeking pleasure outside of matrimony, but Puzzle is unusually attuned to the specific quirks of Agnes and Louie’s union, which is neither joyous nor lifeless. It is instead messy and complicated, and in exposing the hidden fissures splintering under a seemingly solid foundation, the movie proves to be an illuminating study of perspective (and of gender roles), revealing how two people can process the same shared experience quite differently.
Among the important questions it asks: Is Louie a decent man or a callous monster? If you asked him directly, he wouldn’t so much choose the former as be shocked at the question in the first place. In Louie’s mind, he’s a perfectly good husband who fulfills his marital obligations, mostly in a negative sense; he never hits Agnes, he never cheats on her, and he never yells at her. And those nevers, in his view, combine to grant him ownership over her. She is free to do as she wishes, so long as she does whatever he wants. And while they have raised their children together, he deems himself the unquestioned head of the household.
In rather extraordinary fashion, Puzzle uses Agnes’ spiritual awakening as a vehicle to chip away at Louie’s lifelong assumptions of male primacy and entitlement. He takes her newfound assertiveness as disobedience, and her desire for independence as an inexplicable violation of their marriage contract. “Where’s dinner??” he asks in disbelief upon coming home to an empty dining room table, and while that line could be lifted straight out of Pleasantville, it underlines the fundamental asymmetries in what he thought was an equitable division of labor. Louie simply can’t understand what he’s doing wrong—as Agnes points out during one bedroom spat, that he doesn’t understand is the root of the problem—and Denman, no stranger to playing unlikable characters (he was Jenna Fischer’s loutish boyfriend on The Office), delivers a deceptively intricate performance, anchoring Louie’s mounting frustration in befuddlement rather than malice. That makes him a perfect foil for Macdonald, who radiantly highlights Agnes’ quiet determination but takes care not to oversell her transformation. Agnes has always been strong; the puzzles just happened to unlock that strength and make it visible to her husband.
Returning to the question of meaning, it’s reasonable to wonder if Puzzle—which is based on the 2011 Argentine film of the same name, and which, in the infinite stupidity of the MPAA, has been rated R for a handful of “fucks”—ultimately delivers a different message than its makers intended. There are times when it seems to be shooting for uplift, as the affirming story of a woman finally choosing to take control of her life. But given that Agnes is so often misunderstood, and has spent so many years unable to make her voice heard, my lingering impression is one of sadness. She may be slightly happier now, but will she ever truly be in an environment that challenges her, or be surrounded by people who appreciate her gifts? These questions are not entirely unpleasant, and that you’re likely to ask them is a testament to the movie’s thoughtfulness and compassion. And in crafting such a complicated and intriguing protagonist, Puzzle assembles itself into an appealingly rich mosaic, even if a few pieces remain stubbornly out of place.
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.