In recent years, people of color have started to gain greater representation and make their voices heard more clearly within the film industry. As they are able to express themselves more authentically with films such as Get Out, Luce, The Farewell and more, many critics, authors and actors have begun to reexamine older titles for faulty or problematic storytelling because they were not helmed by artists of the same race, creed or ethnicity as those being represented in their films. The Help is one dubious recent example. When it was released in 2019, Rian Johnson’s Knives Out garnered critical and commercial acclaim for its "woke" critique of old money, veiled racism and bigotry. Upon reexamination, however, the film’s just as wrapped up in its own confused biases as the characters inhabiting it, especially in the writing of its protagonist, Marta.
Johnson’s desire to shift the spotlight to the oft under- and misrepresented Latin American population is noble. Having Marta beat the irredeemably monstrous Thrombey clan should be a big win for the character and the people she represents. But Marta doesn’t succeed because she's smarter, tougher or more driven than her entitled White counterparts; Harlan Thrombey’s fortune isn’t earned, it’s passed on to her on the merits of her morality. Her only trait is that she’s a good soul, down to the fact that her only real character flaw is her physical inability to lie (even eeking out a fib causes her to vomit).
Marta isn’t given much more development apart from that and the limited characterization is pandering and patronizing, especially since she effectively serves as the film’s lead. Despite No Time to Die star Ana de Armas’ wonderously fervent and emotional performance, Marta is severely lacking on the page, a fact made even more upsettingly ironic considering the character of every single member of the branching Thrombey family is so much more clearly defined and flavored than hers. In particular, Katherine Langford’s Meg, the closest thing Marta has to a friend in the family, is given tons more complexity through her struggle to weigh justice and compassion against keeping the luxurious lifestyle granted to her by her grandfather’s fortune.
And what conflict is Marta given aside from her possible culpability in the film’s murder mystery? Fear of her undocumented mother’s potential deportation. Yet while this adds further tension to the story, the film could arguably function just as well without it. And by using this trope, Knives Out shallowly continues to perpetuate the annoying and hurtful narrative that all immigrants from down South are solely and exclusively illegal, despite trying to subvert expectations in many other ways.
Ultimately, Marta is only a means to the film’s end of condemning White entitlement. Her value to Knives Out comes not from her character or personality, but solely from the shallow, back-patting feeling audiences get from what her victory takes away from others, not what she gains.
There are stories to be told about people of color and other underrepresented groups, and we need them, but these protagonists must be people and people first, ones whose backgrounds, motivations and beliefs actively inform their characters, not the other way around. Though the film has good intentions, with Marta and the people she stands in for being so thinly and patronizingly characterized, Knives Out is, in the end, just a honeyed, still othering remix of the phrase "you people."