Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous: Film Review of Death on the Nile
Attribution: Fernando de Sousa from Melbourne, Australia, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Geoff Carter
A few weeks ago, I reviewed Reptile, (Pen in Hand Review of Reptile), a Netflix murder mystery. While the film contained an interesting premise and had a promising beginning, I voiced some complaints about the gratuitous—and unnecessary—sensationalized and overdone aspects of the story. Reptile was basically a plausible and well-plotted mystery, but there were some completely unnecessary red herrings and plain-out fakes—not classic whodunit twists and turns, but plot twists that had nothing to do with the mystery. There also seemed to be an exorbitant amount of gratuitous violence and gunplay, along with some murky symbolism.
In this previous review, I brought up Murder on the Orient Express, one of the new Kenneth Branagh adaptations of Agatha Christie classics, as another example of a good mystery clouded up by supercilious writing, glitzy production values, and gratuitous violence. Christie was a magnificent mystery writer, one of our best, and her plots are models of ingeniously clever twists and astute chronicles of human behavior. Her red herrings are plausible, but not deceptive or insulting to the reader. Her characterizations are simple and straightforward. Readers don’t get to know the character’s backstories in detail, but they don’t need to. All they need to know is if Madame X or Miss Scarlett or Colonel Mustard has a plausible motive.
The second of Kenneth Branagh’s Christie adaptations, Death on the Nile, suffers from many of these same flaws, but these shortcomings aren’t quite as distracting as they are in Murder on the Orient Express.
Death on the Nile opens in Belgium during World War I with a long tracking shot reminiscent of the film 1917. Our hero Hercule Poirot’s infantry company is ordered on a virtual suicide mission to take a bridge across the open plains of No Man’s Land. Poirot suggests an ingenious twist to the attack, which saves hundreds of lives, but the attack results in the disfigurement of the future detective’s face—the reason for his famous elaborate mustaches. All of this is new to fans of Agatha Christie. Poirot was never a soldier.
The film moves ahead twenty years to a London nightclub, where Poirot, now a world-famous detective, is assailed by paparazzi as he enters the bar. Inside, a seamy blues band is playing while Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer) and his fiancée Jackie (Emma Mackey) are bumping and grinding on the dance floor like two dogs in heat.
Hear that? It’s Ms. Christie spinning in her grave. While the literary Poirot is a man of the world, he sticks out like a sore thumb in this place—which seems an anachronism in 1930s London.
While sitting in the lub, Poirot closely observes Simon and Jackie and then her friend the heiress Linnet Ridgeway (Gal Gadot), and then Linnet and Simon as they dance and seem to fall instantly and deeply in love.
The film then cuts to Cairo, where Poirot happens to run across an old Bouc (Tom Bateman) cavorting on the Great Pyramids of Gaza. Bouc, there with his mother Euphemia (Annette Benning), reveals he is in Egypt to attend the wedding of Simon and Linnet. The wedding and reception are set in a gorgeous hotel. Also in the wedding party are Louise Bourget (Rose Leslie), Linnet’s maid, Dr. Linus Windlesham (Russel Brand), Linnet’s ex-fiancé, her godmother Marie Van Schuyler (Jennifer Saunders), her traveling companion Mrs. Bowers (Dawn French), Andrew Katchadourian (Ali Fazal), Linnet’s cousin and lawyer, and Salome (Sophie Okonedo) and Rosalie Otterbourne (Letitia Wright), a blues singer and her manager niece.
When Jackie, Simon’s spurned ex-fiancé shows up at the occasion, Linnet, shaken by her presence, asks Poirot to stay on with the honeymoon party to ensure her safety. She’s afraid her old friend Jackie might cause trouble. Poirot advises the newlyweds to go home. Linnet agrees but Simon persuades her that they should go on a cruise ship, the Karnak, to escape Jackie. The party boards the ship, which is lovingly and lengthily filmed with a series of tracking shots, dolly shots, and close-ups. The camera tracks from lower deck to upper deck along the beautiful wooden cruise ship. The brass fittings, open-air decks, shuttered cabins, and glass-enclosed ballroom are beautifully filmed. Even the mahogany inboard speedboat water taxi is beautiful.
This is the tip of the iceberg. The sets, costumes, and production values during the honeymoon trip are almost over-the-top opulent. Of course, Linnet is a rich woman, so the milieu is entirely believable, yet the glitz still seems excessive. Branagh the director seems determined to make the film a beautiful spectacle, costume pageant, and a magnificent travelogue. From the initial beautifully photographed shots of the Great Pyramids and the Sphinx to Abu Simbel to the luxurious interiors of the S.S. Karnak, the film’s color pallets and composition are meticulously composed. At times there is a compositional symmetry reminiscent of the works of Wes Anderson.
Of course, this begs the question of why this attention to material detail? Death on the Nile is a period piece which in some Hollywood films tends to lead to excess—or maybe overzealousness in the production department (see Cleopatraor The Ten Commandments)—but in this case, it almost seems superfluous. It’s fun to vicariously participate in lives of the rich and famous, but this degree of opulence hardly seems necessary to the plot.
The honeymoon party visits Abu Simbel, where near disaster strikes, and then return back to the ship and dance to the music of Salome and her band. When Jackie unexpectedly reappears and causes a row, and finally, in a rage, shoots and wounds Simon, things really start rolling. The next morning Linnet is found in her bed, shot to death.
As Poirot begins to conduct his investigation, it seems as if (in the true tradition of the classic whodunit) everyone has a reason to kill Linnet. Her lawyer has been embezzling from her estate, her ex-lover is still smarting from her rejection of him, her maid’s engagement was broken off by Linnet, and Rosalie and her aunt remember being discriminated against by the victim. And on and on. Everyone has a reason to see the victim dead.
As Poirot works, and the net closes around the killer, the film pulls back from the brilliant sets and costumes and focuses instead on Christie’s story. The revelation of the identity of the killer and the devices used to commit the murder are ingenious, although very nearly overshadowed by Poirot stalking into the ballroom with a gun leveled at the suspects. Christie’s eminently civilized Belgian detective would never do that; he would never need to. Hollywood’s Poirot apparently is a gunslinger, a war hero, and—in the end—in love.
The acting is by and large very well-done. Branagh is properly continental as Poirot (when he’s not throwing down on people), and Rose Leslie hits the perfect note as Linnet’s beleaguered but eminently loyal maid. Annette Benning is, as always, as brilliant as the script allows her to be. Gal Gadot and Armie Hammer aren’t asked to do much as the happy couple—and they don’t. Their performances are flat and predictable. Emma Mackey goes a bit over the top as the mentally unstable Jackie, but part of that performance can be explained in terms of the plot. (I refuse to add any spoilers). The casting of Russel Brand as the doctor is just plain odd. The characters seem to be, for the most part, set dressing. Branagh’s direction, especially near the end, is tight and focused, but the previous visual excesses already spoiled this viewer’s appetite.
Michael Green’s screenplay tries too hard to establish the thematic motif of amor feu—which—again—is not really essential to the plot. The beginning backstory, while beautifully shot, is entirely superfluous to the whodunit plot.
In the end, Death on the Nile is too much. It’s too pretty, it’s too cute, it’s too violent, and it tries too hard to be a cinematic masterpiece, succeeding only in nearly overshadowing Agatha Christie’s brilliant story.