A “Wake Up, Dead Man” Review
Monsignor Jefferson Wicks was dead. This particular fact would not matter in the grand scheme of things, except that, after three days, he was no longer dead—he walked, embraced a friend and disappeared into the night.
Without spoiling too much, I will say that the plot of the third “Knives Out” movie by director Rian Johnson—known for the enrapturing “Breaking Bad” episode “Fly,” and the arguably less captivating movie “Star Wars: The Last Jedi”—exceeds expectations in its scope, implications and portrayal of the American Roman Catholic Church.
And that is what the movie focuses on: the American Roman Catholic Church, and all its struggle with tradition, attempts at a more welcoming approach to sinners, and occasional bouts of scandal. All of it is there—lying as open as a tomb after the day of resurrection.
Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin), the vicar of Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude parish in New York State, is the grandson of the previous pastor, Reverend Prentice. Wicks’ mysterious death, which is the object of inquiry by Private Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), raises questions because of its impossible nature: he was stabbed in the back in a closed room that only he was in. How could this impossible murder have taken place?
Really, though, who actually cares—the movie posits. One of the chief tensions in the movie is between the seemingly-moral imperative to embrace rational explanations for everything (solving the impossible crime) and embracing what the movie calls “storytelling.”
Father Jud Duplenticy, the movie’s protagonist and main suspect, at his first meeting with Blanc, asks him what the church building makes him “feel.”
Blanc, at first tentative and unsure about the invocation of a word other than “know,” responds, “Well, the architecture, that interests me. I feel the grandeur, the… The mystery, the intended emotional effect.”
Blanc honestly continues, “And it’s like someone has shone a story at me that I do not believe. It’s built upon the empty promise of a child’s fairy tale filled with malevolence and misogyny and homophobia and its justified untold acts of violence and cruelty while all the while—and still—hiding its own shameful acts. It’s like an ornery mule kicking back, I want to pick it apart and pop its perfidious bubble of belief and get to a truth I can swallow without choking.”
Following this, Fr. Jud reassures Blanc that his honesty is welcome, and agrees that what the church building—and, by extension, the universal edifice of The Church—does, with its architecture, garments, traditions and rites, is “storytelling.”
Fr. Jud, a man convicted in his faith, then asks whether these stories “convince us of a lie, or do they resonate with something inside us that’s profoundly true—that we can’t express any other way. Except storytelling.”
More than any other of the twists and turns, this conversation is what clues Blanc into the secret of Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude and helps him unravel the mystery. The question of how storytelling—which a more orthodox fellow might call faith—is related to mystery is the question at the heart of the movie.
“Wake Up, Dead Man’s” portrayal of the American Catholic Church, if accepted with charity, is not a scathing critique or even a backhanded slap at Christianity in a post-Christian society by self-proclaimed “superior” rationalist thinkers. Instead, it holds a mirror to the Church as it is today, telling a story of humans caught up in scandal who wish to simply know the truth.
Granted, the mirror that this movie holds up to the Catholic Church in America does still have its imperfections. Most of those inaccuracies, though, are used for comedic or dramatic effect, such as Fr. Jud’s exclamation of Jesus’s name at the revelation of a detail (which he quickly follows up with an apology).
Overall, “Wake Up, Dead Man” is a worthy movie to give a watch, especially for Catholics. The ending, which you may find disagreeable for what it says about the modern Church, still makes it hard to deny that Director Johnson’s portrayal of American Catholicism is nigh accurate.