Shards and Sutures: A Knives Out Review

With wry bemusement I learned that Rian Johnson’s third Knives Out installment would have as its protagonist a young-ish boxing priest in Albany, New York, for I am possibly the only person in the world who matches that description. In Wake Up Dead Man Fr. Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), an earnest young priest who in his former life once killed a man in the ring, is sent off to be the vicar to Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, a small upstate parish.

Wicks lords it over a shrinking church whose congregation is a melodramatic secretary, Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close), and a handful attractive professionals. In the background lurks a strange story: the rumored fortune of Fr. Prentice Wicks (widowed before ordination) and his strained relationship with his daughter Grace, who is Jefferson’s mother. After Prentice’s death, Grace went on a rampage in search of the inheritance, desecrating the church, its crucifix, and tabernacle. That night defines the parish, which learns to see itself as under attack. “The world is a wolf,” Wicks explains. But when Wicks is found stabbed on Good Friday, it becomes clear that grave threats lie within.

The movie has an uncanny feeling, as though watching someone watch the movie. A surreal quality pervades much of the pablum streaming sites churn out: weirdly manicured scenery, seemingly airbrushed faces, and completely inane dialogue. In an early scene, the gardens where the bishop meets Fr. Jud are implausibly nice, and you are unlikely to find a rural Catholic parish filled exclusively with good-looking professionals. It is just not the way of a universal Church.

However, Johnson’s interviews about the movie reveal that the uncanny feel has a deeper source: its Catholicism is a screen, through which Johnson has his eye on something else. In actuality he is working out his evangelical Protestant upbringing and, as he said, Catholicism provided a double appeal. It first has an aesthetic appeal, beauty, and symbolism unavailable to someone who grew up in churches that “look like Pottery Barns,” but it also gave him some distance when depicting parts of evangelical life left him uncomfortable.[1] So it is not exactly a movie about Catholicism. Although there are exceptions, Wicks’ style and content are pretty foreign to twenty-first-century Catholic life, and it is no surprise that the characters keep referring to the altar as a stage.

Johnson himself is a sympathetic figure. One gets the sense that, despite having been “young, dumb, and full of Christ,” there were troubling experiences that led to his departure from church in his twenties. “Every character in this represents some fragment of my experience with faith,” he says.[2] Sincere as this is, the approach means many characters are just that—fragments, shards of real people, dead men.

As a result, the dialogue gets limp and some of the acting labored. Otherwise talented actors seem like they did not get a lot to work with and lapse into awkward gestures. Fr. Jud once killed a man in the ring, but other than a sporadic guilt complex, he is full of boyish affability. Conversion does real and radical things, but it usually does not just erase the personality of lethal fighters. And one does not find a lot of happy-go-lucky folks at the boxing gym.

The self-professed skeptic Benoit Blanc, whose sexuality and religious mother lie implicit in the background, shows a remarkable openness to Fr. Jud but shuts him down at the last minute. The congregation—lawyer, influencer, paralyzed artist seeking a cure, the burnt-out novelist—turn out each to be stereotypes with some monotone character motivation. Since they are flat, the plot suffers: while the death-and-life mystery at the heart of the movie is carefully unspooled, the plot has one or two major holes.

All this is symptomatic of the movie’s underlying ambivalence about the Cross. Richard Niebuhr captured that ambivalence when he distilled the creed of twentieth-century American Christianity: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.”[3] At Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, though, Wicks has retained judgment but jettisoned the Cross. After the defining event decades before, the church has left the apse wall bare, an empty space where the crucifix had been. Wicks’ preaching is full of wrath, but Jesus’ passion and death have been overshadowed by a resurrection that visits retribution on personal enemies. This judgment holds the Cross at arm’s length, daring to call things out but refusing to enter real suffering. Martha Delacroix, his sidekick, is anxious about many things but not about la croix.

Fr. Jud mirrors Wicks’ confusion. He appeals to the Cross from the outset and says the Church needs less fighting stance, more arms outstretched in a cross. And while he speaks in an orthodox way for much of the movie, Johnson at the end lets him too fall into a dichotomy, compassion without courage. What Blanc draws from Fr. Jud’s ministry: “God is a fiction. My revelation came from Fr. Jud, his example to have grace. Grace for my enemy. Grace for the broken. Grace for those who deserve it least.” Instead of the free and costly gift of divine life, here is a lightly coated, slightly preachy morality tale, a therapeutic command to show a little empathy—cheap grace.

At the same time, where character motive lags, Catholicism drives the plot forward. Much of the movie takes place during the Triduum, the murder plot revolving around Good Friday and Easter Sunday. At key moments the sacrament of confession, depicted or implied, heightens and then eventually resolves the drama. Amid insipid and scatological dialogue the movie’s most striking writing is, as others have noted, the Church’s own work: the appearance of the prayer of absolution in the final scenes. Perhaps Catholicism is present also as a latent alternative to evangelical Christianity: Johnson’s conversations with priests while making the movie seem to have made an impression. Not accidentally, one of the movie’s few deeply human scenes—when an outsider’s spiritual crisis rips Fr. Jud away from the investigation—was inspired by these conversations. It is perhaps the one time the movie genuinely integrates experience.

In a sense, Catholicism furnishes the deep empathy that Johnson wants but cannot quite get to. Two rather different twentieth-century writers, W.H. Auden and Edith Stein, illuminate why Catholicism so fruitfully drives the plot. In his essay “The Guilty Vicarage” Auden lays out with almost scholastic precision his account of what makes for a true detective story. In describing the human milieu of such stories he asserts that the “detective story writer is also wise to choose a society with an elaborate ritual and to describe this in detail.”[4] While there are still some tells, Johnson tightened up the liturgical details so that the movie is more realistic than most. “A ritual,” Auden says, “is a sign of harmony between the aesthetic and the ethical in which body and mind . . . are not in conflict.” Although this is an idealized description—minds certainly wander during the liturgy—in a detective story ritual, already dramatic in itself, creates a further dramatic contradiction with the communal rupture that murder brings.

The essay is fascinating in its own right and it contains elements that merit elaboration; in his treatment of concealment and his view that murder precipitates a unique social scenario in which “society has to take the place of the victim,” he anticipates René Girard. However, for our purposes his most helpful insight is his distinction between “art” and “fantasy.” Fantasy, he holds, is always an attempt to avoid one’s own suffering, while art “is a compelled sharing in the suffering of another.” Detective stories furnish the reader with the fantasy of innocence, of “being restored to the Garden of Eden,” and “the illusion of being dissociated from the murderer.” A work of art—he cites Crime and Punishment as an example—can feature a murder but compels an “identification with the murderer that [the reader] would prefer not to recognize.”

Wake Up Dead Man refers in passing to G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, as does Auden. Johnson has said Father Brown is a great detective “because he’s a good priest, not because he understands God . . . but because he understands how humans are corrupt and fallible.”[5] What Johnson seems to approach but miss is how Father Brown ever became a good priest. He knows human brokenness—no need to be a good priest to spot that—but he also knows its capacity for repentance and reconciliation with God. As Auden points out, Father Brown solves cases not as a wholly pure outsider “but by subjectively imagining himself to be the murderer.” Auden implies: Chesterton’s stories about Father Brown may be fantasy, but the character of Father Brown is, in reconciling, genuinely involved in a work of art.

If fantasy and art turn at least in part on identification with a suffering other, then Edith Stein may easily take us a step further. She too speaks of fantasy, though in a different sense from Auden: as a phenomenon distinct from but perhaps in analogue to empathy. In On the Problem of Empathy, written before her conversion to Catholicism, she holds that “God can comprehend people’s lives in no other way [than empathy]. As the possessor of complete knowledge, God is not mistaken about people’s experiences. . . . But people’s experiences do not become God’s own, either.”[6] But by the time she wrote The Science of the Cross, she had come to understand something new. When Jesus Christ, true God and true man, offers himself on the Cross he is “reconciling all things to himself” (Colossians 1:2). He “made the both one” (Ephesians 2:14). Without that we are left ambivalent, dead souls in need of awakening.

For all his talk in interviews of empathetic grace-giving, in interviews Johnson protests a bit too much. While Fr. Jud may have left the ring, Johnson makes recourse to images of conflict: he wanted to “pit” the good and bad of church life “against each other” in the movie, to “attack” something personal. He enshrines the binary at the end, when Fr. Jud renames the church (something canon 1218 makes difficult), “Our Lady of Perpetual Grace.” Rather, God’s grace meets costly courage in the one thing Johnson is missing, the Cross. On Ash Wednesday the Roman Missal prays:

Grant, O Lord, that we may begin with holy fasting
this campaign of Christian service,
so that, as we take up battle against spiritual evils,
we may be armed with weapons of self-restraint.

The Prefaces for Passiontide laud “the wondrous power of the Cross,” by which “your judgment on the world is now revealed and the authority of Christ crucified.” Venantius Fortunatus’ hymn Pange lingua sings of Jesus’ gloriosi proelium certaminis, a “battle of glorious combat.” None of this precludes but rather gives birth to what one Lenten post-Communion prayer calls “the remedies of your compassion.” The Cross’ judgment on the world is a judgment on sin, on deceived human judgment, on the false love that sunders humanity from God and leaves us at the capricious mercy of our divided impulses. The Cross gathers up the fragments and sutures them together with the wounds that make us whole.

Notably, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein came out around the same time as Wake Up Dead Man. They have some similarities: Netflix-funded, directors haunted by childhood Christianity, suffused with Catholic imagery. But the results are quite different. Johnson’s characters are made from little bits of one man’s experience, while the Creature is made from little bits of many men sutured together. An actual dead man awakened, he yet seems more whole than anyone in Johnson’s ensemble. Perhaps it comes as no surprise that Elizabeth, the one character who loves the Creature in his suffering, is always wearing a blood-red cross around her neck.

In the end, Fr. Jud is subject not just to Johnson’s fragmented vision, but to the same mortal error as his predecessors at Our Lady of Something: he lies. When he ends up with the fortune, contained in a jewel, and Wicks’ beneficiary comes armed with lawyers, Jud and Blanc deny knowing anything. The bishop joins them. Like Prentice and like Martha, they hope that a little well-intentioned deceit will keep others from temptation. When Fr. Jud hides the jewel in the sternum of the new crucifix he hews for the church, the movie’s tensions linger: is the Cross a true treasure, or an empty chest concealing just another fiction? It would take more than a detective to find out.

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