REVIEW

Modest champion: Actress Kelly Macdonald in Puzzle

A FILM can sometimes be so quiet and uneventful, yet at the same time so full of tenderness and charm, that at the end you would stand up and applaud if such exhibitionism weren’t so utterly at odds with what you’ve just seen.

Instead you simply sit there, smile or maybe even dab with a finger at the corner of your eye. Puzzle is such a film. It stars Kelly Macdonald, the brilliant Scottish actress whose ability to play a sweet, uncomplaining example of what the Americans call homemakers was recognised years ago by the Coen brothers.

Her performance as Carla Jean, the meek loving, anxious wife of Josh Brolin’s ill-fated Llewelyn Moss in the Coens’ 2007 masterpiece No Country For Old Men was one of that great film’s many pleasures.

But in Puzzle, Macdonald’s exquisite performance as an unassuming, unassertive, devoutly Catholic homemaker is the principle pleasure; all the picture’s other virtues radiate from it. She plays Agnes, whom is both cherished by her blue-collar New England family and taken completely for granted.

At the start, someone is celebrating a birthday. Agnes carries a cake ceremoniously into the room, but in fact the birthday is hers. She has made the cake, bought the candles, lit them, and now she blows them out, a deeply reluctant object of attention.

Her principle purpose in life, other than to attend Bible classes, is to care for her husband Louie (David Denman), who runs a car-repair workshop, and their two teenage sons, Ziggy (Bubba Weiler) and Gabe (Austin Abrams). She sees it that way, and so do they.

At first, her domestic drudgery and its drab backdrop, even the clothes she wears, suggest a period piece, a story of small-town America perhaps set in the 1950s.

We only learn this is the present because one of Agnes’s gifts is a modern smartphone. She does not welcome it – “like carrying a little alien robot in your purse”, she says – but is delighted to receive a challenging 1,000-piece jigsaw, which she completes in no time, then breaks it up and does it again. It is a map of the world, an irony not lost on us, even if it is on her; Agnes is the daughter of Hungarian immigrants, but could hardly be less worldly.

The short journey to New York counts as a daring adventure for Agnes. But she undertakes it, because only there, in a shop called Puzzle Mania, can she find more jigsaws like the one she has just completed.

She also finds an advert, “Champion Desperately Seeking Puzzle Partner”, and digging even deeper into reserves of boldness she didn’t know she had, answers it.

THIS leads her to a wealthy, lonely Robert, a man as urbane as she is provincial, played with quirky, beguiling charisma by Irrfan Khan. The unlikely duo start practising for a doubles competition in the National Jigsaw Puzzle Championships.

If they win, they will go on to the world championships in Belgium. They appear to have a chance, because Agnes has a genius for competitive puzzling that leaves even Robert agog.

But what this also means is that she must somehow explain to her husband why she’s no longer reliably at home every afternoon, preparing his dinner and darning his socks.

Certainly, a lesser drama would make him a demanding brute. But Louie is a decent cove who adores his wife, albeit preferably on his own terms. She is his puzzle, and maybe that’s the significance of the film’s title, because actually jigsaws are an irrelevance, though a delightfully wholesome one.

Agnes could have demonstrated a rare talent for juggling or mental arithmetic and the one-line synopsis would still be the same: a middle-aged woman seeing beyond the narrow horizons’ life seemed to have mapped out for her.

Moreover, as she grows in confidence, she begins to take charge of the relationships with the men in her life – Louie, her boys, even Robert. She learns how to be assertive with more than just jigsaw pieces.

Of course, this kind of personal growth is not exactly original cinematic territory – in fact, Puzzle is directly inspired by a 2009 Argentinian movie. But nothing about it feels derivative or predictable.

Marc Turtletaub, a first-time director, has made a terrific job of shaping the screenplay (by Oren Moverman and Polly Mann) into a sensitive and very moving film. Hats off to the whole production team for a very lovely film.

Verdict: Charming and captivating

★★★★★