The Man Who Wasn't There (2001) Reviews

• Black and White and Gray All Over

  pc_dean2001-11-26

  Billy Bob Thornton has the perfect face for film noir. His craggy, drawn features lead up to sunken but large and staring eyes, and cheeks that look to be made out of plaster. Particularly when shot in black and white, his face becomes a landscape of shifting shadows, while he doesn't move a muscle. He is able to give the impression of a man at war with himself even while sitting perfectly still and staring ahead. He's Jeremy Irons, only without that unsettling accent. The Coen brothers take great advantage of their stars' granite physiognomy throughout "The Man That Wasn't There," constructing several shots around Thornton staring into a point just slightly away from the camera, impassive as an Easter Island head, moving only to smoke an ever-present cigarette while the obligatory noir voice-over narration runs. His voice is perfect, too: a kind of calm, measured rumbling, which describes incredible events but never seems amazed by them. Thornton says "I don't talk much," and it's true: he doesn't do much either, but he is still fascinating, and commands our attention. The Coens take great relish in the noir conventions, even beyond the 1940s setting and the black and white photography (let's face it, we're so used to '40s movies in black and white that color would look a little weird). The story follows classic lines (with a few wild divergences): Thornton's character is a barber in one of those small postwar California towns that Hitchcock was so enamored of. He comes up with a scheme to raise some money, which naturally spins a little beyond what he anticipated. That's all I can say in good conscience, and the plot goes pretty far afield (I mean REALLY far afield, catering to fans both of Dashiell Hammett and "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers"). But really, you know what to expect, if you've ever seen one of these movies before: greed, dark secrets, and murder, in a world of fedoras, cigarette smoke, snapping lighters, and deep moral turpitude. A world where nothing or no one is what they seem, and the only sure thing is that, in the end, some sap is gonna get it. As good as Thornton is, he can't carry the movie alone. Fortunately, he is surrounded by a top-notch cast, including a lot of familiar Coen veterans, and it is this that really makes this movie work. Michael Badalucco puts in a hilarious turn as Thornton's gabby brother-in-law, Frances McDormand is effective in her relatively few scenes as his brittle wife, and James Gandolfini plays yet another boorish tough guy to a turn. Practically shoplifting the movie is Tony Shalhoub, playing a fast-talking Sacramento lawyer who doesn't so much speak as summate. His discussion of Heisenberg is almost worth the ticket price alone. Christopher Kriesa and Brian Haley get a lot of mileage out of their brief appearances as a pair of slightly dim cops (aren't they all in these movies?) Joel Coen, who directed, makes sure that the movie is consistently interesting to watch, too. Black and white photography being mostly about shades of gray, noir is perhaps the only genre that benefits from the relative primitiveness of its visual technology. Coen, therefore, sticks with it, unlike the colors he used in the '30s themed "O Brother Where Art Thou?" which managed to be both more fanciful and less surreal than this movie. He uses the light-and-shadow character of black and white to great effect here, carefully crafting his images to make best use of it. In fact, if the movie has a fault, it's that the images are a little TOO carefully crafted. The purest noir was cleverly filmed, but it allowed its cleverness to seep into the background. You have to watch a few times to pick up on how sharp the filmmaking is. Coen is unable to hide his arty cleverness, and so in the end, fun as it is to watch, the movie is a bit too pretty to truly capture the essence of its forbears. Perhaps realizing this, the Coens tweak the conventions mercilessly, and inject a streak of humor that is funnier for being played so straight (there are lots of funny lines, but don't be surprised if you are the only one in the theater laughing. Actually, don't be surprised if you are the only one in the theater, period.) The movie does require a bit of patience; the pacing is intense but quite slow, and the story wanders like a drunk driver. In the end, it is somewhat debatable whether the twisty plot is fully resolved, or whether that even matters. "The Man That Wasn't There" is best viewed as a wicked cinematic joke, and in that regard, it succeeds, in (Sam) spades. But what do I know? I'm just some sap.

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• an interesting contribution to the Coen's ouvre

  crow-132001-10-31

  I found this to be a pretty interesting film by the Coens'. I was well aware of the ability to do noir, as evidenced by 'Blood Simple', as well as many-layered, dialogue-driven narratives as in 'Miller's Crossing.' But what I found intriging about this movie was that it was about inconsequence. Billy Bob Thornton's character, Ed Crane, is similar to William H. Macy's in 'Fargo.' Both have unsatisfying positions in lowly lives. Both had received their jobs by "marrying" into them- Ed at the Barber Shop, and William's at the car dealership. The difference is, whereas the kidnapping plot is sought out in "Fargo", the blackmailing plot falls into Ed's lap by sheer choice (luck? fate?) Ed's just a guy who wants to improve his lot in life- nothing too different then you or me. His wife's affair simply gives him the opportunity to do so. He didn't mind the infidelity, it is after all " a free country." But, of course, if she was faithful, there would be no noirish plot to pursue, correct? Quiet ambition drives Ed. After the dry-cleaning attempt goes sour, he sets his sights of Scarlett Johansenn's (who is quite remarkable) character's piano playing ability, in hopes of becoming her manager and "making enough to get by." Thornton's "Ed Crane" really is the man who wasn't there. He sits- nearly brooding- quietly, observing life laconically. I actually found this movie quite sad. In the end, the only one who cares about his story is a men's magazine. And that's another big difference from 'Fargo" in which the pregnant Frances McDormand curls up with her husband, and you feel as if everything is just right in the world. That feeling is definitely lacking from "The Man Who Wasn't There." Some viewers in the theater I saw it at said it was "the funniest movie they've seen all year." Sadly, I think they're missing it. Most of the humor is typical Coen's deadpan, but it is mostly generated from a tone of unease and tension. It's clever, but you waon't be slapping your knees like in "Raising Arizona" or "The Big Lewboski." Instead, you'll just be intrigued by the wonderful story that the Coens- who have become quite the master of their craft- have weaved in this beautifully textured, perfectly cast, and incredibly nuanced film.

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• The Inexorable Hand of Fate.

  nycritic2005-04-18

  Noir has always been about people caught in circumstances where there seems to be no way out and one bad decision may spawn a series of events that eventually catch up with the people involved. In this story, Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton, channeling Humphrey Bogart through his looks and Fred MacMurray through his voice-overs) is the victim of his own life. Caught in a dysfunctional marriage of apparent convenience to Doris (Frances McDormand), working a dead-end job as a barber with her brother, going through life like a shadow (people have a tendency to forget his name), he also suspects Doris may be having an affair with her boss Big Dave (played by James Gandolfini). When a deal comes by which could make him some big money, he thinks he will carry this through and get some revenge towards his wife. Things go wrong -- the man with whom he has jumped into a shady business has disappeared -- and Crane accidentally (or out of rage) commits a murder which lands Doris in jail. To say more of the story would be to reveal twists and turns of the plot as it advances towards its full-circle and those must be experienced instead of told in a "review." But suffice to say, every action generates a consequence, and even plot threads which had been apparently been dropped eventually re-surface with tremendous, almost painful irony and remind us that noir is an unforgiving genre, unkind to its characters, cruel to the extreme. If at times the story seems a tad long it's in the subplot involving Scarlett Johansson who coats the movie with a Lolita-esquire persona as her character essays a tentative affair with Crane; however, even that storyline feeds into Crane's retribution at the end. Gorgeous black and white, textured use of deep-focus, this is a movie Gregg Toland would have loved to have his hands on had this been 1941 instead of 2001. THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE could be called stylistic in its frank depiction of textbook noir (James Cain comes to mind), but the Coen brothers make it work all the way through with smart direction, scenes that smolder, and a touch of their own unique humor interspersed here and there. Not their best but very, very close.

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• Chic Nihilism: Woody Allen with Style

  tieman642011-02-01

  "The task of art today is to bring chaos into order." - Theodor Adorno The Coens start by selecting genres, and then colliding them. So while a film like "The Big Lebowski" merges film noir with stoner comedies, and "Burn After Reading" merges the 1970s conspiracy thriller with 1930's screwball, "The Man Who Wasn't There" instead takes the tropes of 1940/50's noir and mingles them with 1950's UFO flicks and early science fiction B movies. Billy Wilder's noirs are homaged here, but the chief influence is Hitchcock, the film taking place in the same town as that of Hitchcock's "Shadow of a Doubt", the film's lead character sporting the name Edward Crane ("Psycho") and the film's title seemingly alluding to "The Wrong Man". Their genres selected, the Coens typically cook up some reoccurring visual motif which links the genres being homaged. Here, saucers, wheels and smoke replace the bowling pins and tumbleweeds of "Lebowski", the hats of "Miller's Crossing" and the circles and hoops of "Hudsucker". Though their films are played with a straight face, the Coens' films are all postmodern comedies or pranks on the audience. For example, though treated as being "serious genre works", "Fargo" was farce pretending to be fact, the Coens seeing how "far" they can "go" with the audience, and the supposedly "serious" "True Grit" is a parody of Charles Portis' parody, both intentionally with no "true grit". Even a more outlandish film like "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" is an elaborate prank, the film a meta-parody of both the film within "Sullivan's Travels" and Homer's Odyssey. Ironically, most people take these films dead seriously and as "deep art". But regardless of the genres being homaged, at their core every Coen film alternates between noir and screwball comedy, the chaotic nature of the screwball genre meshing with the tragic, indeterministic nature of noir. Noir being screwball without the comedy. Think Woody Allen's "Melinda and Melinda", in which the same plot is told twice, once as comedy and once as tragedy, the point being that life is itself an absurd, pointless, comic tragedy. The feeling of "pointlessness" which permeates every Coen flick is itself the chief tenet of postmodernism, which denies absolute truth, revels in nihilism, relativism, surface re-arrangement, sarcasm, homage, pastiche, irony and adheres to French philosopher's Jacques Derrida's understanding of language, in which words and images have no meaning and are viciously self-limited. If you believe theorists, who predict that postmodern art, before it is fully supplanted by the era of cyber interactivity, is destined to reach the point at which it mirrors the universe it believes in - total randomness, utter nihilism (ie the universe of noir) and an aesthetic of schizophrenia (in which cinema degenerates to a string of references, not only increasingly divorced from a reality which is itself lost, but repeatedly digested by amnesic consumers) - then surely cinema has already reached this point. Indeed, the Coens, like Woody Allen, Charlie Kaufman and Todd Solondz, now exclusively make films about the world being "about" nothing other than cold, cosmic causality. I list these directors, though, not because their oeuvres are almost entirely about "the meaningless of all things", but because they all play formalist games about this "nothingness". Trapped in an intellectual dead end, they are unable to do anything other than serve up delightfully inventive ways to tell stories about...the pointlessness of telling stories. In any case, "The Man Who Wasn't There" marks the point at which the subtext of all Coen films starts being brought to the forefront. From here on we would get "The Ladykillers", "No Country", "Burn After Reading" and "A Serious Man", all films in which the Coens turn away from the world and soliloquise over the vacuity of existence and the cruel hilarity of the universe. Like the Coens' best films, though, "Man" is helmed by an actor who refuses to allow his character to be turned into a mere victim or buffoon. Here, Billy Bob Thornton plays Edward Crane, a stoic small town barber who gets embroiled in a noir plot which, like most noirs, is designed to highlight his utter uselessness as a man. More than a noir victim, though, Crane embodies the Superfluous Man, living life without purpose or direction and moaning about the way hair always grows back no matter how much he cuts. Where does it come from, he asks us. Why doesn't it stop? The ubiquitous hair, of course, embodies Crane's impotency. By the film's end he thus becomes dejected ("The facts have no meaning," Crane mopes), realises that he makes no difference in the world and becomes resigned to the fact that he may as well be invisible, or even dead, as hair ultimately grows on without him. Like "A Serious Man", much of the film is spent mentioning things like "Schrodinger's Cat" and "The Uncertainty Principle", the point being that things change when observed, that free agency is an illusion, that everything Crane does is nullified by an opposite circumstance and that we're all better off just "abiding" with the flow. The Coens even throw in a long monologue in a prison cell, in which a rambling character sums up the very point of Heisenberg and Schrodinger for us. It's outdated existentialism, everything directly spelt out. Aesthetically the film is great, filled with moody blacks and whites, stark "pop-art" images and beautifully lit smoke. Thornton comes across as a morose Bogart, his character endearing next to the Coens' usual cocktail of motor mouthed oddballs and dangerous fat men. The film's use of black and white and UFOs is also very clever. It was shot in colour and then had its colours removed, suggesting Crane's own disappearance or existential fade out, whilst the UFOs and the constant threat of alien abduction foreshadow Crane's fated vanishing. 8/10 – Stylish, but heavy-handed and thin. Watch Ray's "In A Lonely Place" to see pessimism done right.

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• Why you should see this movie

  jhochner2001-10-29

  It is beautifully and refreshingly unpretentious. It is acted and filmed with grace and delicacy. This is the kind if movie we hope to find while sitting through most of the glitz and superficiality that gets made. Without question worth eight bucks, and two hours of your evening. Score another one for the Coen brothers.

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