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'Puzzle' Movie Review with Casey

When an ordinary, underappreciated housewife in working-class Connecticut receives a jigsaw puzzle as a birthday gift, she realizes she has a talent for completing them. While a thousand piece puzzle might take you or me days to complete, this woman can finish one in only a couple of hours. After discovering this strange unexpected gift, the shy housewife slowly ventures outside her sheltered domestic world, partners with a fellow puzzle enthusiast, and starts practicing for a national jigsaw puzzle competition.

This film is the English language adaptation of the Argentinian film Puzzle, or Rompecabezas, from 2009 that was written and directed by Natalia Smirnoff. This English language version is a quiet, modest, funny look at how you can still discover things about yourself no matter how ordinary you might think you are. And often those discoveries can take you in new, exciting, sometimes painful, directions.

Director Marc Turtletaub’s adequate handling of the story reminds us that everyone’s life is a puzzle. Everyone is trying to figure things out in their own way. One of the characters puts it best in this film when he says, “When you complete a puzzle, you know that you have made all of the right choices.” Everyone who watches this movie will be in a better mood when they leave the theater. 

Casey T. Allen is a native of Utah who graduated from Utah State University with a Bachelor's degree in English in 2007. He has worked in many capacities throughout USU campus and enjoys his time at UPR to continually exercise his writing.