Death on the Nile (2022)

 

Kenneth Branagh has decided to extend his Poirot franchise, following the commercial success of Murder on the Orient Express, with a mostly star-studded version of Death on the Nile. I didn't even like his previous attempt, but I am a big sucker for Agatha Christie, so sure as shooting (of which there is an excess in this movie), I hied me down to our local movie palace. 

There I sat, watching dumb trailers, gearing myself up for more of Branagh's historically unprecedented take on Poirot's mustache. And lo! The movie starts on the Belgian front in 1914, where a fresh-faced farmboy named Poirot observes the birds on the wind and urges his elaborately mustachioed commanding officer to attack the Germans now, under cover of gas. (Darwin, the in-house WWI expert: "Gas wasn't used until 1915.") The attack is a success, but young Poirot's face is blown up a la the Phantom of the Opera. His loving fianceé, in a speech the screenwriters carefully wordsmithed, extols the virtues of love and urges him to grow a mustache. 

Nothing in this is canonical. Poirot was neither a farmer nor, as Sarah Phelps would have us believe in her execrable BBC adaptation of The ABC Murders, a priest. Christie, if anyone bothers to consult her, has given us his backstory: he was an up-and-coming Belgian policeman as a youth, and by WWI was past the age of military service -- was in fact, around 1914, a refugee in England, where he solved The Mysterious Affair at Styles (the first draft of which was written in 1916 by the 26-year-old dispensary assistant Agatha Christie, who had worked with Belgian refugees). 

But taking all this rather mundane backstory into account would require more grounding in realism than Branagh is prepared to give. Death on the Nile is a production oddly unmoored from reality, with the aesthetic and emotional nuance of a video game. Everything is too slick, too overwritten, too on the nose. A choreographed dance scene at a nightclub goes through the motions of seduction without once feeling like something any two humans might ever do. Gal Gadot and Armie Hammer, as the glossy young rich things at the center of the mystery, wear their costumes as competently as wind-up mannequins. The emotion is flat, the sexuality forced, the representation predictable, and the scenery retouched. 

Let us, while we are on the subject, ponder the tropes of modern screenwriting. All of the character traits from the novel have been jumbled up and reassigned, with several of the more appealing comic subcharacters eliminated all together (along with any touch of humor). Poirot is castigated at one point by a character who has a justifiable grievance against him, and yet the reproach is excessive in its vehemence. This same self-righteous condemnation makes an appearance once or twice more in the movie, from various characters. The screenwriters seem to think it a compelling form of moral discourse. It is not. It lacks what T.S. Eliot called "the objective correlative": an emotional reaction that rightly corresponds to the provoking stimulus. Fictional characters, of course, are always over-reacting to statements or situations, in ways that reveal their motivations. The problem is when the writer pens an overreaction as a justified emotional state, as some kind of moral positioning. "How dare you!" shaming is never interesting unless it reveals conflict within the accusing character. 

May I suggest, for anyone yearning for a handsome Death on the Nile adaptation, the version with the definitive Poirot, David Suchet, with the fine J.J. Feild as the heiress's simple husband. Feild is the poor man's Jude Law, but most of us are poor men. This production is not without its problems, and the first thirty seconds (revealing a sexual relationship that viewers will have reason to assume anyway) can be profitably skipped, but it retains both the plot and the human scale of Christie's novel. And human scale is a quality the viewer will crave after a dose of Branagh's packaged grandeur.