Wake Up Dead Man — a review in progress

Today, due to the relentless demands on my time and attention at work, I’m trying a new approach. I’m going to write and revise my review in stages, right here, in front of God and all humankind. I figure that if I start writing this in pieces, I can deliver more efficiently some of the things I want you to know, and make the most of the small windows of time that open during my busy day and then tend to abruptly slam shut. If I wait until I’m finished with a long, complicated, rigorously edited review, you won’t see it for several weeks. So, here is a work in progress. If you check back, you’ll likely find that the review has expanded and improved.

So, here’s a beginning, hastily typed out on Tuesday, December 2, almost a full week after I saw Wake Up Dead Man in a packed theater, one that was roaring with laughter and enthusiasm from the beginning of the movie to the end, at Landmark’s Crest Cinema Center.

Within the first two minutes of Rian Johnson’s second sequel to Knives Out, I was drawn to the proverbial “edge of my seat,” eyes wide, brain buzzing, ears and heart wide open. He gained my confidence by presenting us with a shockingly paradoxical spectacle: one Catholic priest (played by Josh O’Connor, the most exciting actor in the movies so far this decade) cold-cocking another one and breaking his jaw. Then we see that priest, apologetic and regretful, facing a jury of priests for disciplinary action.

And, to our surprise (or, perhaps not, these days), one of the priests sounds inclined to excuse this violence: “We need fighters today,” he says, “but to fight the world, not ourselves. A priest is a shepherd. The world is a wolf.”

What the young, humbled priest says in response rings in my ears like the clearest bell, a clarifying truth: “No,” says young Father Jud Duplenticy. “I don’t believe that, father, respectfully. You start fighting wolves and before you know it everyone you don’t understand is a wolf. ... Christ came to heal the world, not fight it.”

This is wisdom. And, what’s more, it is the Gospel. I might go even further — yes, I will. It is the life blood of the Gospel, but blood that has become polluted with carcinogens of hatred, greed, lust for power, all of the things that Jesus taught us to reject, all of the things that have come to characterize the church in America today, thus making Christianity seem toxic to new generations of seekers.

And it comes from a character by the name of Jud (which can be an abbreviation of Judah or Judge) Duplenticy (which contains a suggestion of duplicity, which can mean deceitful or imply doubleness, but also plenty, suggestion a contradiction at the heart of today’s church worldwide).

I felt a surge of hope there, in the movie theater, that I have felt only a few times in recent years — briefly in Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme (earlier this year), and last year in Edward Berger’s magnificent Conclave. Once in a while, it seems, God touches an artist with a clarity of vision that allows them to speak — and, better, show — some truth so effectively that it cuts right through the corruptions of this age, shows us what we are meant to be and to do, and allows us to grieve just how far we have fallen from that ideal. And in that grieving, we have an opportunity to move forward, in the direction of healing and hope.

Look at this: I’ve written more than 400 words here, and I haven’t even crossed the two-minute mark of Wake Up Dead Man. There is so much more to come in this astonishing, ambitious, wildly entertaining, and consistently hilarious murder-mystery. Wake Up Dead Man is simultaneously the most fun I’ve had at the movies, and the most moved I have been by a movie, since the last one that kept me up late at night writing about it for days and days: Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, which easily became my favorite movie of 2021.

“You start fighting wolves and before you know it everyone you don’t understand is a wolf. ... Christ came to heal the world, not fight it.”
— Father Jud in Wake Up Dean Man

“It’s as if this movie was made for me.” “Wake Up Dead Man seems calibrated to appeal to my interests.” “To give a shape to my frustration.” “To show the world what I wish the world would see about injustice.” “About political manipulation.” “About why I left the church.” “About why I stay in church, even though it makes me sick.”

These are the kinds of things I’ve been hearing from close friends and colleagues who have seen this movie. And that’s encouraging, as these are cinephiles who love movies and who believe that art can help light the way to a better world. They went in with high hopes, because they have liked, and probably loved, the Rian Johnson series that began with 2019’s Knives Out.

Knives Out is — let’s say you don’t already know — a good-humored, Agatha Christie-loving detective story about a family of privilege-boosted squabblers clashing over the fortune of their patriarch, and who lose their minds when they find out the money might be inherited by an undocumented immigrant, the young caretaker of the patriarch. The story mirrored back to us the hatred and cruelties we now see amplified at the top levels of America’s so-called “government.” And it gave conscientious moviegoers a cathartic experience of watching the truth-seeking detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig, trying on a Foghorn Leghorn drawl and stumbling only somewhat competently through the scene of a crime) help a kind-hearted nurse (Ana de Armas, before glamour made her more a Movie Star than an actress) solve the murder (or was it?) of the old man she cared for. This brought about the kind of satisfying justice we would like to see more often in the real world.

The sequel, Glass Onion, took Detective Blanc and a host of materialistic celebrities away to an exotic island owned by a tech billionaire, and he when somebody ended up dead (shocker!), he ended up exposing the self-serving lies, the preposterous conspiracies, and the morally bankrupt hearts of self-proclaimed “disruptors” — those who, enjoying unjust privilege, revel in wanton destruction. (Today, they would all have positions in the Trump administration that they aren’t qualified for, and they’d be committing all manner of crimes with cover from their conman overlord.)

While both films are stocked with A- and A-minus-list actors, and designed for maximum entertainment, it’s clear that their maker has his finger on the pulse of current events and means to apply pressure to the “swellings” that concern us all.

So perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that Wake Up Dead Man is set in a distinctly American distortion of Christianity, in which politics, power, and grotesquely toxic masculinity have turned the pulpit into a platform of vile propaganda. It’s as if Rian Johnson is loading each movie with x-rays of . . . let’s call it this present darkness. And we see there, in the microcosm of a community fractured by a murder, a diagnosis of what’s really wrong at the heart of America today. Inevitably — in this era of politics and religion merging and, thus, poisoning each other — we end up looking at how Christianity has lost its way by excusing and enabling the toxins of patriarchal privilege and white supremacy.

Our narrator and protagonist, Father Jud, has been, as a disciplinary action, appointed as an assistant to the intolerable Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin, reveling this chance to play a depraved megalomaniac). And he quickly figures out that Wicks is not guiding his parish in the paths of righteousness, but turning them into dependents who get off on his condemnation of outsiders, and who serve him in the hopes of getting what they want from him.

That parish is made up of quite a colorful cast of characters: Martha, Wicks’s faithful assistant and a lifelong parishioner (Glenn Close); Vera, a troubled lawyer (Kerry Washington); Cy, an ambitious young politician investing in the power of social media (Darryl McCormack); Nat Sharp, an embittered doctor (Jeremy Renner); Lee, a sci-fi novelist who has been converted to Wicks’s apocalyptic rants; Simone, a gifted musician suffering chronic pain (Cailee Spaeny). Any one of them, or some conspiracy of multiple players, might have something to do with the murder. And threats might have come from outside as well, as Wicks made a practice of condemning visitors mid-homily, driving them from the congregation, and thus throwing fuel on the fire of the faithful’s prejudice toward “the world” outside.

And so, Father Duplenticy has his work cut out for him if he is to find a peaceful place among them. When murder fractures their community, he is, as the newcomer, and one who publicly clashed with Monsignor Wicks, a prime suspect.

But Benoit Blanc knows better than to favor the obvious explanation. This community is too complicated, and fraught with grudges and motives. Relying on intuition every bit as much as his dubious rationality, Blanc keeps Father Duplenticy as close as Watson is to Holmes in this investigation, sensing in the young priest’s cooperation an integrity that will serve his inquiry.

But neither of them is prepared for the layers of deception, corruption, and depravity that their interrogations and covert operations will uncover. Even the local sheriff (Mila Kunis) will become skeptical of their approach to solving the case. But the resolution will reveal more than just the motives for a murder. The conclusion will give us a renewed understanding that the corruption of a faith community is not a condemnation of the faith itself. Jesus warned his followers that “Many will come in my name and deceive many.” Here is a prime example of what happens when Christ’s church begins to fear the world, or seek to benefit from it, rather than to take on the burden of humility and strive to serve.

Check back, as much, much more of this review is on the way . . .