Saoirse Ronan Is The New Queen Of Whodunits in 'See How They Run'
#194, Part 2: "See How They Run," "Trailer Watch"
Edition 194, part 2:
Hey movie lovers!
As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word!
In this week’s newsletter: With three new movies hitting theaters that I wanted to write about, I literally broke my outbox. Substack informed me my email was too long, and so (for the first time in newsletter history!) I’ve split this week’s movie talk into two separate emails. Hope you enjoy both.
Here in part two, let’s talk whodunits and “Trailer Watch,” featuring the latest from Alejandro González Iñárritu.
See How They Run
Theaters
In theory, whodunits should be an incredibly tired genre. Agatha Christie, its patron saint, published her most well-known works almost 90 (!) years ago, and by now, there have been so many incarnations and adaptations that audiences know the genre tropes like the back of their hand. “If you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all,” as one character puts it in See How They Run.
Yet the genre is undergoing a resurgence, and in a world of fewer and fewer studio comedies it seems to me to be the one that’s still allowed to have a little fun. It’s done so by eating its own tail. Genre tropes aren’t ignored or pretended to not exist, they are embraced as explicit text. Knives Out centers its story around a mystery novelist, and this movie around a real life Christie adaptation on the stage (“The Mousetrap,” ironic because it’s the longest running play of all time, and has been begging audiences continuously since 1952 not to spoil the twist).
As I’ve said many times before, there’s nothing the current era of filmmaking likes more than winking at the audience with an ironic detachment and letting them know that it too is in on the joke. In any other instance, that attitude murders (no pun intended) all dramatic tension. But its a perfect marriage with the whodunit story. These movies can have their cake — jokes playing on the audience’s expectations of the tropes — and eat it too, because we’re more than willing to fall for a twist-on-a-twist ending.
Fun is the best word to describe this movie, thanks almost entirely to the genius of Saoirse Ronan, who might just be the best actor on the planet full-stop. I mean, she’s 28 years old with four Oscar noms, and here she shows that her comedic timing is just as good if not better than her prestige chops. She plays a junior detective, following around Sam Rockwell’s more classic, weary, drunken detective like a wide-eyed puppy dog.
This isn’t a movie I would feel the need to rush out immediately and see in theaters, but as soon as it hits streaming services it will rise to the level of must-watch for any fans of the genre. I know I for one wouldn’t mind if they made five more of these every year.
Trailer Watch: Bardo, A False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
It’s become quite fashionable to crap on Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Mexican filmmaker who won back-to-back Best Director Oscars for Birdman and The Revenant before people decided all of a sudden they didn’t like his pretentious style of filmmaking. Well, that and the fact that critics don’t respond well to frontal assaults, as when Iñárritu dismissed all criticisms of his latest movie as “racist.”
The fact is, whether Iñárritu admits it or not, he’s made a self-aggrandizing, naval-gazing piece of autofiction about a Mexican filmmaker reckoning with his own success. That’s hard to root for but not always a death sentence. It’s exactly what Bob Fosse did with All That Jazz and that was a rousing success. I don’t predict the same critical or awards success here, and at a whopping 2 hours and 54 minutes long, I don’t suspect many readers of this newsletter will be seeing it either.