‘Puzzle’ is a Complex and Captivating Drama

There’s a lot simmering just below the surface of “Puzzle,” Marc Turtletaub’s exceedingly delicate portrait of Agnes (Kelly Macdonald), a housewife who happens to be a jigsaw genius. The film is an unexpected ode to the specific entrapments of the Connecticut working class: Agnes, a second-generation Hungarian immigrant, lives in Bridgeport, just minutes from the Metro North station, but she never goes to the city. She lives with her husband, a car mechanic, and their two sons in the house where she grew up and cared for her own parents. Her existence revolves around the grocery store and the Catholic Church. Even without all the context, the details of Agnes’s life offer so much potential material. But rather than going for the panoramic view, “Puzzle” focuses on the minute — an escalating domestic drama that begins with, well, a jigsaw puzzle. 

The film opens with Agnes alone in her funereally wallpapered dining room, hanging a birthday banner in the fading evening light. The next scene is of a party — or rather, of Agnes scuttling around a room full of people like a wind-up toy, driven by a compulsive need to make herself useful. She asks her husband, who looks like a human knockwurst, if he’s having fun. He says he’s having a great time and announces that he’s going outside for a smoke with his buddies. She promises to call him when it’s time for cake. It isn’t until a few minutes later, when we see Agnes blow out the candles, that we realize it’s her birthday party. 

Later, alone again in that wallpapered room (the nod to the 19th century Connecticut feminist novelist Charlotte Perkins Gilman might not have been intentional, but it begs to be acknowledged), she unwraps her gifts, one of which is a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. She finishes said puzzle at her dining room table with savant-like speed and her top-cardigan-button-buttoned life opens up, sending her on a journey of self-discovery that leads her to New York City and Robert (Irrfan Khan), an eccentric Indian inventor and competitive jigsawer in search of a tournament partner. Robert draws Agnes out in a way that her husband, a well-meaning but not especially curious guy with no capacity to read her, cannot. As their relationship develops, Agnes’s tightly coiled insecurities start to unspool, and Macdonald unspools so well that you barely even notice what’s happening until she’s almost too far gone.

The operative word is “almost,” because there are no huge, explosive moments  — which shouldn’t come as a shocker, since the plot essentially hinges on one woman’s desire to assemble thousands of tiny cardboard pieces. But the beauty of Macdonald’s performance is that she’s quirky and subtle enough to make Agnes come alive in the least flashy way possible. She conveys so much with a smooth surface, which makes for great marital tension. And she’s often funny without meaning to be, a good quality in a film that veers, at times, into over-sincerity. This could have been a movie about Scrabble, or sudoku, or chess, or any number of sedentary games of skill, with only a slight reduction in metaphorical cargo. But Agnes is definitely a puzzle, sufficiently complex and captivating to make it mostly worth the hour and 43 minutes.  

“Puzzle” is playing widely.