Everyman Bristol
Spoiler: It was Agatha all along.
Death on the Nile confirms all my preconceived notions about Kenneth Branagh, Ridley Scott and Agatha Christie.
Branagh is a very good actor, as up for broad pantomime characterisation as he is for heavy duty Shakespeare. Not having read the book I don't know if his Belgian-face portrayal of Poirot was an off-the-page recreation or a radical reimagining. (Was he more Jeremy Brett or more Benedict Cumberbatch, if you see what I mean.) Sofa-Buddy tells me a lot of the mannerisms were straight out of the book -- ordering all the desserts off the hotel menu, but sending one back because he only likes to eat in even numbers. Some of Branaghs asides and digressions are quite delightful. Having been employed as a kind of P.I to check up on the character of an African-American singer he remarks "this I meant I had to listen to bluesy music which I did not expect to like but actually I liked very much....".
Branagh is a very good actor, as up for broad pantomime characterisation as he is for heavy duty Shakespeare. Not having read the book I don't know if his Belgian-face portrayal of Poirot was an off-the-page recreation or a radical reimagining. (Was he more Jeremy Brett or more Benedict Cumberbatch, if you see what I mean.) Sofa-Buddy tells me a lot of the mannerisms were straight out of the book -- ordering all the desserts off the hotel menu, but sending one back because he only likes to eat in even numbers. Some of Branaghs asides and digressions are quite delightful. Having been employed as a kind of P.I to check up on the character of an African-American singer he remarks "this I meant I had to listen to bluesy music which I did not expect to like but actually I liked very much....".
There is a prologue set in the Great War in which we learn the origin of Poirot's moustache, although not of his bullwhip or his fear of snakes. I don't know what purists would make of this. Or even if there are any Agatha Christie purists.
Ridley Scott (co-directing with dear-dear Sir Ken) makes everything look beautiful and hyper-real: it isn't quite clear what is very expensive location filming in Egypt and what is very-nearly as expensive CGI recreation. Bouc -- Poirot's young Watson, played by Tom Bateman -- is discovered flying a kite off the side of the Great Pyramid. "You are desecrating one of the seven wonders of the world and also spoiling a quite sublime jaffa cake" says Poirot. I imagine he wouldn't be allowed to do that on the actual monument, but the mock up is quite convincing. There are long tracking shots across the boat and entirely gratuitous but very pretty cut-scene of the boat's anchor and of big fish eating little fish. We see a crocodile eating its dinner at one point, but I assume that No Herons Were Harmed in the making of the picture.
But I don't really grok Agatha Christie. I saw a play of her's in London decades ago. It's quite well thought of; it may even still be running. It was about some people snowed-in at a guest house where a murder happens. It is very short, and the twist is surprising enough that it surprised me at the time. I also saw a film about a lot of posh people on a train. I think Albert Finney was playing the moustache. The solution was so ridiculous as to make me think I'd wasted the previous several hours. I seem also to recall one where the murderer had put the detective off the scent by playing a tape recording of a gun shot in the wrong place. I suppose tape recordings were exotic cutting edge technology at the time. My imagination runs to people using luminous paint to convince superstitious English lords that german shepherds are ancestral curses, but not with country parsons (it may have been the parson, it was certainly At The Vicarage) hiding tape decks in bird boxes.
Enjoyable and harmless: I will be interested to know if proper Agatha Christie enthusiasts regard it as a worthy attempt to treat the canon with literary gravitas or a rather silly attempt to tell us things about Poirot that the author didn't intend and wouldn't have been very interested in.
Ridley Scott (co-directing with dear-dear Sir Ken) makes everything look beautiful and hyper-real: it isn't quite clear what is very expensive location filming in Egypt and what is very-nearly as expensive CGI recreation. Bouc -- Poirot's young Watson, played by Tom Bateman -- is discovered flying a kite off the side of the Great Pyramid. "You are desecrating one of the seven wonders of the world and also spoiling a quite sublime jaffa cake" says Poirot. I imagine he wouldn't be allowed to do that on the actual monument, but the mock up is quite convincing. There are long tracking shots across the boat and entirely gratuitous but very pretty cut-scene of the boat's anchor and of big fish eating little fish. We see a crocodile eating its dinner at one point, but I assume that No Herons Were Harmed in the making of the picture.
But I don't really grok Agatha Christie. I saw a play of her's in London decades ago. It's quite well thought of; it may even still be running. It was about some people snowed-in at a guest house where a murder happens. It is very short, and the twist is surprising enough that it surprised me at the time. I also saw a film about a lot of posh people on a train. I think Albert Finney was playing the moustache. The solution was so ridiculous as to make me think I'd wasted the previous several hours. I seem also to recall one where the murderer had put the detective off the scent by playing a tape recording of a gun shot in the wrong place. I suppose tape recordings were exotic cutting edge technology at the time. My imagination runs to people using luminous paint to convince superstitious English lords that german shepherds are ancestral curses, but not with country parsons (it may have been the parson, it was certainly At The Vicarage) hiding tape decks in bird boxes.
I don't think it is giving away the big twist to say that Death on the Nile doesn't really have a big twist. Someone is murdered; and all the people on the boat would have had a very good reason, and a pretty good opportunity, to murder the person who was murdered. It turns out to have been one of then; but you wouldn't have been that surprised if it had been one of the others. If I had been on Jon Pertwee's old Whodunnit show, I would probably have guessed right, not by picking up on the clues but by making a wild guess that the person least likely to have done it is the person most likely to have done it, if that makes sense.
The first half consists of two thirds of the English acting profession drinking champagne and talking to each other. Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders can't really stop being French and Saunders, although Saunders in particular is always very watchable. (We saw her being brilliant in Lady Windermere's Fan on one of the cultural lockdown channels last year.) Russell Brand underplays his aristocrat-turned-medic so much that I didn't realise he was Russell Brand, which is probably no bad. After about an hour of set up, the Murder happens, and we get another hour of Branagh interviewing all the characters one after the other. They reveal things, or else Poirot infers things, that the audience couldn't possibly have spotted for themselves, although I devoutly believe that all the clues were technically in there. It may be that Death on the Nile is the kind of book you are supposed to read twice and spot how clever the writer has been the second time through. (I am told this is also true of Jane Austen's Emma, although that has fewer murders.)
Then Branagh gets everyone together and tells then what their motivations and movements were throughout the film, in some detail. Again, I can swallow Sherlock giving the Peelers detailed physical descriptions of the culprit by examining his left boot than I swallow Poirot saying "and then you did such-and-such a wildly improbable thing to cover your tracks; and then you ran from such a place to such a place and saw such a thing happening". It reminded me a little of Stan's cold readings in Nightmare Alley: jolly clever to spot the posh lady's handbag is heavier than usual, but his precise description of her gun and her motivation for carrying a gun is simply a sequence of lucky guesses. (Unless Poirot is pretending he knows more than he does to force confessions? I still don't buy it.)
Finally, our Belgian opens the sealed envelope and reveals that it was Prof Plum in the Library with the Lead Piping. The denouement is impressively melodramatic, I must admit; and the (I assume interpolated) epilogue in which it is implied that Poirot is going to stop being a cerebral recluse and get a life, possibly involving bluesy music, is quite touching.
Enjoyable and harmless: I will be interested to know if proper Agatha Christie enthusiasts regard it as a worthy attempt to treat the canon with literary gravitas or a rather silly attempt to tell us things about Poirot that the author didn't intend and wouldn't have been very interested in.
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