…and the ever-reliable Deacon Steven Greydanus has done a fine review of it. Here’s a taste:
About two-thirds of the way through Wake Up Dead Man—the exhilarating third installment in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out series starring Daniel Craig as gentleman sleuth Benoit Blanc—a young priest makes a phone call to a local family-owned business. This business may have a critical piece of information bearing on the murder that Blanc is trying to solve, and on the priest’s own uncertain future. The chatty woman who answers the phone is familiar with the church and the murder, making it challenging for the agitated priest to get a word in edgewise; and, with Blanc impatiently gesticulating at the priest to get the information that is their priority, the halting exchange initially plays as small-town comedy.
Then the phone call takes an unexpected turn, and the woman on the other end (Bridget Everett) is no longer merely a humorous impediment to a murder investigation, but a human being with her own cares and woes. As the conversation continues, Rev. Jud Duplenticy (an ingenuous John O’Connor) arrives at a moment of clarity regarding what his real priorities are. The Knives Out movies have always existed in a moral universe larger than the mystery du jour, but that universe has never been larger than in Wake Up Dead Man.
Blanc’s third adventure is both a welcome departure and a gratifying return to form. On the one hand, where both Knives Out and Glass Onion are set among wealthy, privileged elites whose smug superiority the films delight in skewering, Wake Up Dead Man is Johnson’s version of a cozy small-town mystery, centered on the very ordinary parishioners of an insular Catholic parish in upstate New York. On the other hand, where Glass Onion stands out as a vengeful fantasy about sticking it to the world’s exploitative, incompetent overlords, Wake Up Dead Man, even more than Knives Out, honors compassion and competence in serving others. Knives Out turns on the heroine being a good and caring nurse; that Fr. Jud is a good and caring priest is even more important here.
What I appreciated (apart from the satisfying intricacy of the puzzle Rian Johnson always confects) was the real respect he has for the goodness and integrity of the protagonist priest. Their is a particular moment in the story when he encounters a woman in crisis and simply drops everything else to help her. Likewise, at a certain point he simply chooses to die to himself without ulterior motives. And the portrayal of grace–and even grace given via the sacrament of confession, was deeply moving to me. It took me back to my own first encounter of the grace of the sacrament.
If you’ve not seen it, give yourself a treat and do.
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3 Responses
It’s a great movie and the young priest truly takes his duties seriously. The older priest, with all his fire and brimstone turns out to be a fraud. Daniel Craig is wonderful.
The movie subverts the current “liberal older priest vs. conservative younger priest” trope.
One thing I loved about this movie is that at no point does it try to politicize Catholic orthodoxy. For example, Father Jud is obviously (and rightfully) disgusted by how Monsignor Wicks twists the Church’s moral teaching into a cudgel, which he uses to purge his flock of a single mother, a gay couple, and probably many others besides – NOT because Father Jud dissents from Church teaching, but because he has the proper understanding of the Church as a field hospital for sinners and realizes that these people are sincerely looking for God. Beyond that, he routinely goes out of his way to try to pray with people, offer them Confession and spiritual direction, and be a channel of Divine grace in their lives – once again demonstrating that he believes in BOTH the reality of sin AND the possibility of forgiveness through Christ – in contrast to Wicks, who constantly fuels their worst fears and keeps them mired in perpetual guilt while dangling the promise of fake miracles in front of their noses (“All these will I give you, if you bow down and worship me…”).
The one thing I found kind of surprising is that they DIDN’T make Monsignor Wicks a Trad priest (if you watch the Good Friday scene, they’re clearly celebrating the O.F. Passion Liturgy in English), especially given the number of Trad priest-influencers who display similar characteristics. Then again, the Trads certainly don’t have a monopoly on being problematic – just look at E. Michael Jones (who, if his body of work is any indication, has about as much dislike for the Trads as he does for the Jews) or Thaddeus Kozinski (who considers both the Trads AND the folks at WherePeterIs to be Satanic cultists and apparently regards Francis as an antipope because he encouraged people to take the COVID vaccine).