Kelly Macdonald
“PUZZLE” My rating: B
113 minutes |MPAA rating: R
The narrative arc of “Puzzle” is so familiar you can practically predict the plot from the first scene.
But this tale of a housewife’s liberation from her stifling life is so energized by three fine performances that you find yourself inexorably drawn into its world.
When we first encounter Agnes (Kelly Macdonald) she is busy catering to party guests in her modest suburban New York home. She’s so concentrated on making sure everyone — especially her garage-owner husband Louie (David Denman) — is having a good time that it’s a shock when we realize the gathering is to celebrate her birthday. (Typically, the hard-working and under appreciated Agnes has baked her own cake.)
She’s captivated by one of her birthday presents– a jigsaw puzzle. One day she sets aside her chores and sits down to ponder this gift, and is gratified when she pieces together the puzzle in just a few minutes. This sets off a puzzle binge. Agnes gets so wrapped up in puzzling that on some days she forgets to cook an evening meal for Louie and her two grown live-at-home sons.
Her puzzle obsession takes her on a rare foray into NYC and a shop specializing in new and used jigsaw puzzles. There she sees a flier from a jigsaw champion looking for a new partner with whom to enter jigsaw competitions.
This individual is Robert (Irrfan Khan), who earned a small fortune from an invention he patented years earlier. Now he spends his days wandering around his posh townhouse, nursing the wound of his failed marriage (the wife, his jigsawing partner, has bailed).
Robert is stunned by Agnes’ natural affinity for visual problem solving — she’s some kind of puzzle savant. He asks her to be his competition partner. This will mean regular practice sessions in the city; Agnes lies to her family, telling them she’s seeing to an injured aunt.
Kelly MacDonald, Irrfan Khan
One might go into “Puzzle” expecting it to climax with a triumph at the puzzle nationals…but the actual process of puzzle solving isn’t of much interest to director Marc Turtletaub and screenwriters Polly Mann and Oren Overman (adapting the Argentinian film “Rompecabezas”).
No, they’re more intent on capturing Agnes’ slow flowering through her friendship with Robert.
They could hardly be less alike. He’s of East Indian descent, a world traveler whose photo has appeared on the cover of a national magazine. She’s a Roman Catholic housewife who has rarely looked beyond the walls of her home. Now she sees new possibilities, including romance (you didn’t think we could avoid that, did you?)
Turtletaub, who up to now has been mostly a producer of films like “Loving,” “Sherrybaby” and “Little Miss Sunshine,” brings the tales humanistic concerns front and center.
MacDonald gives a wonderfully understated performance as a woman who, well into middle age, discovers the power of her own intentions and possibilities. Khan, one of the most versatile actors now working in film, makes for a fine romantic interest.
Arguably the most difficult role here is that of Louie, the unambitious, unadventurous husband Agnes is leaving behind. It would be all to easy to make him the heavy of the piece, a physical or emotional abuser, a beacon of blue collar misogyny. But Denman provides a remarkably nuanced performance, showing us that Louie is just as trapped as the wife he loves but cannot keep up with.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
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