Review: "Puzzle"

The great thing about jigsaw puzzles, someone says, is that the end you know you’ve made all the right choices.

Agnes (Kelly Macdonald), a mousy housewife from the New York suburbs, is very good at puzzles. Crazy good. Which isn’t to say that she’s made all the right choices. She’s living one of those lives of quiet desperations we’re always hearing about. Puzzles end up as being not just a distraction for her, but a path out of the drudgery.

Agnes is married to Louie (David Denman), a well-meaning lunk who runs an auto repair shop. They have one boy, Gabe (Austin Abrams) about to graduate from high school and go off to college, and another, Ziggy (Bubba Weiler), just out of school and working (grudgingly) at his dad’s garage because his grades weren’t good enough.

They’re Catholic, and really mean it. Agnes’ entire existence pretty much revolves around keeping the house in order, cooking meals and attending church functions. They don’t watch the news or go anywhere other than their lakeside cabin for fishing. When Gabe brings home a girlfriend (Liv Hewson) who says she’s a Buddhist, Agnes admits she doesn’t really know what that means.

Her relationship with Louie is like a well-cared-for car that has lost its zip, or never had any.

He’s a decent guy, but he treats Agnes like an appendage rather than a partner. The movie opens with a party happening at their house, with Agnes carefully preparing beforehand and serving everyone instead of participating. It’s only when she brings the cake out that we realize it’s her birthday party.

That’s her life: she gets a party, but she has to bake, serve and clean up the cake herself.

She’s always been a whiz at puzzles. A 1,000-piece one that would take most people days is just a quick snap for her. Agnes decides to take a trip into New York City to find some more challenging puzzles at a specialty store, and sees an ad for a champion seeking a partner.

Who knew: there are people who actually do jigsaw puzzles -- puzzlers, they call themselves -- competitively.

This brings her to the door of Robert (Irrfan Khan), the indolent champion. He’s rich, having invented something for a big pile of cash years ago. Now he just does puzzles because he’s good at it and he never really has anything better to do. After wowing him with how fast she burns through a complex puzzle, they agree to practice twice a week in preparation for the national championships next month.

Soon Agnes is living a double life, making up stories about visiting her sick aunt to cover her absences. But she misses a few church meetings, even forgets to make dinner because she’s so busy puzzling. This sends the entire family into turmoil, with Gabe dreaming of a gap year traveling in Tibet, Ziggy thinking about culinary school and Louie scratching his big ape head at how everyone’s gone bonkers.

Director Marc Turtletaub and screenwriters Polly Mann and Oren Moverman, adapting the story from an Argentine film, are less concerned with the perambulations of the plot than emotions honestly explored. Macdonald is understated and authentic, playing a woman of simple background who finds herself enthralled and scared by new possibilities.

The Robert character is regretfully underwritten; we get the sense between his meetings with Agnes that he’s done nothing but wait around for their next scene together.

The best interactions are actually between Agnes and Ziggy. They’re both misfits who want to fit in, but also want to explore their quirky longings. Weiler brings an anxious charm to the kid’s struggles.

I liked a lot of things about “Puzzle,” but the final picture never really came into focus for me. It’s an intimate portrait of life: messy, sprawling and craving organization into a more coherent story.

Review: "13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi"

If you're looking for politics in "13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi," then you'll be searching awhile. Told in the vérité style of "Black Hawk Down" and "Lone Survivor," this gripping war drama from director Michael Bay aims only to capture the on-the-ground events of the terrorist attack on the U.S. embassy outpost in Libya on Sept. 11, 2012.

Although that night has proved ample fodder for presidential politics, congressional hearings and more, Bay and screenwriter Chuck Hogan doggedly stick to the account from the book by Mitchell Zuckoff, who interviewed the Annex Security Team, which defended the compound and tried (unsuccessfully) to rescue Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

The team consisted of CIA employees and ex-military contractors tasked with guarding them. Bay, known for the rambling special effects-heavy "Transformers" films and the like, ditches the fancy trappings and focuses on the rough human camaraderie of soldiers who have left any causes behind and simply fight for each other.

Others will get the glory and the medals, but their reward is "We get to go home," says Jack Silva, a fairly recent arrival to the mission played by John Krasinski. He serves as the audience's eyes and ears.

Bay and Hogan immerse us in the world of the grunts, who live in an untidy compound about a mile down the road from the lush, clean proto-embassy. They share the space with a couple dozen CIA operatives, who are portrayed as eggheads whom the soldiers must guard with jock-like disdain -- former football gods forced to ferry around the math nerds.

"What are all the Jason Bournes doing downstairs?" one snidely asks during a break in the firefight.

At first, the six members of the team are hard to distinguish from each other, all bearded and scary with grim senses of humor. But the cast and crew show us bits of humanity in between the bluster -- the stolen video chats with kids, regretful longing for absent wives, and so on.

James Badge Dale plays the leader, "Rone" Woods, who battles daily with the nebbishy CIA station chief (David Costabile). The spook resents the intrusion these security guys have on their intelligence gathering, even complaining about their grunting exercising outside his window. It's he who refuses to let the elite soldiers rush over to the embassy, dooming Stevens, but he's just following orders from above.

The sprawling battle sequences grab you by the shirt, first the rescue mission to the embassy and then the rigid defense of their own annex. Forced to give up the computer-generated protagonists, Bay proves adept at putting us in the shoes of the flesh-and-blood ones. The scariest moments are not when the bullets are flying, but as the soldiers watch strange men approaching the compound, not knowing if they're friend or foe.

Being a decided member of the nerd class, I might be inclined to disfavor a movie where the beefy soldiers are brazenly glorified while the thinking types are seen as insufferable fools. But "13 Hours" is less about pointing fingers than putting some unheralded guys on pedestals. It's a riveting tale of reaching for heroism amid the chaos.