Knox Goes Away
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: R
Run Time: 1 hour 54 minutes
Stars: Michael Keaton, Marcia Gay Harden, James Marsden, Al Pacino, Joanna Kulig
Writer: Gregory Poirier
Director: Michael Keaton
Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
If you’re going to be a professional hit man, it appears, you need to juggle a lot of balls at once: How to do the killing, how to get away with the killing, how to make sure you get paid for the killing, how to line up your next killing, and so on.
John Knox (a grim-faced, occasionally smirking Michael Keaton) is one of the best jugglers in the business, an in-demand killer with a laser-like focus on the details and a strict code of ethics that dictates he’ll only kill “bad guys.”
But Knox has a problem: He’s been diagnosed with a rapid-onset, quickly fatal form of dementia. Well, that’s the problem behind a more immediate problem, which involves a recent job where he accidentally killed an innocent bystander and then, in his fogged panic, also his partner.
And wait, there’s more: As Knox paces his home trying to figure out what to do next, his grown son (James Marsden) shows up covered in blood, having just slaughtered his daughter’s boyfriend.
Knox has one question: “Did he deserve it?” The answer, of course, is yes (and as the one-time father of a teenage girl, I can sympathize).
And so Knox, who can practically feel his mental faculties swirling down the drain, faces a trifold against-the-clock mission: To clear his son of a homicide that was absolutely justified (so long as we don’t think about it too much), to prepare for his final days, and to provide a healthy nest egg for his long-divorced wife (Marcia Gay Harden) who, in the best movie tradition, simultaneously hates his guts and has never really gotten over him.
Then there’s the Polish sex worker (Joanna Kulig) who drops in every week, the only person close enough to Knox to notice his mental decline. Will she help ease him though his sad end or use his disability to take him to the cleaners?
Yep, that’s a whole heapin’ lot of plot for one movie, but if you’re having a hard time keeping up, imagine what it’s like for Knox, who’s already forgetting faces and keeps ordering cups of coffee, even though there’s another cup sitting right there. (Our confidence in his capabilities isn’t helped when Knox’s grand plan to clear his son involves actually planting incriminating evidence at the crime scene).
Happily, the 13-car pileup of plot elements doesn’t matter much because we’re having too much fun in the presence of Keaton — an actor with an ingenious way of bringing a light touch to high drama — and his costars. Directing his second feature film (he also played a hitman in the first one, go figure), Keaton displays a sure hand, modulating his performance perfectly while ushering all the other characters into orderly orbits around his. Most fun of all is Al Pacino as Knox’s longtime mentor and sometime nemesis; a guy who one could imagine embracing Knox while giving him a shiv to the gut. Pacino tosses off his little jewel of a role in much the same way he announces Best Picture Oscar winners: with deliberate, engaging offhandedness.
I’ve always preferred the funny Michael Keaton: the one who bedeviled Henry Winkler in Ron Howard’s Night Shift; the one who chewed the scenery so hilariously in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice. But he is, without debate, a first-rate dramatic actor, and here he pulls off some mighty fine acting Jiu Jitsu, drawing us into the fading mind of a morally reprehensible guy and sniffing out the spark of humanity that will make him, against all odds, a sympathetic character.
It probably says something about the aging moviegoing audience that there have been so many Alzheimer’s-related films in recent years, some of them quite good, and all of them relying heavily on exquisitely balanced lead performances: Still Alice (Julianne Moore), The Father (Anthony Hopkins), and Lovely, Still (Martin Landau) come to mind. The argument can be made that a thriller with a dementia victim at its center is a tad exploitative, but the same could be said about wheelchair-bound superheroes (Patrick Stewart’s Professor X) or blind stalking victims (Audrey Hepburn’s heroine in Wait Until Dark).
A few years ago, latter-day action hero Liam Neeson starred in Memory, about a hitman with dementia. The premise was similar to Knox, but the script cheated in having the hero forget things only at specific moments calculated to ramp up the tension. Knox Goes Away is far more successful in knitting the antihero’s medical condition and grisly profession into a cohesive narrative fabric. If you were to graph the film’s action, you’d find that Knox’s grand plan to solve all his problems grows increasingly complex just as his mental faculties take a steep downward trend. The fun in the film is in watching Knox gamely try to find the ever-moving sweet spot between those two trend lines.
In the end, Knox’s grim diagnosis serves as both the guy’s curse and his method of deliverance. It’s a gratifying revelation — along with the notion that, although my daughter ended up with a great guy, it would have been nice to know I had some options beforehand.
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