"Science, perception, reality, doubt..." (The Man Who Wasn't There (DVD))

Member Name: Rumblefish

Product:	The Man Who Wasn't There (DVD)
Date:	07/11/01 (86 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Screenplay, acting, lighting, cinematography, music etc etc

Disadvantages: Eh?

2001 has been, in my humble opinion, a mainly appalling year for cinema. Thankfully however, 2001 will forever be remembered as the year of at least one absolutely marvellous film. I am of course referring to THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE. This film is moving and witty, intelligent and thought provoking, visually and aurally dazzling, and features acting of the highest calibre.

This is a film written, produced, edited and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. The Coen brothers remain easily the most consistently brilliant filmmakers working in America today, and it would almost be a surprise were they to make a film that *wasn’t* fantastic. THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE is a more complex piece than their last two films, THE BIG LEBOWSKI and O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU? and not as conventionally commercial or accessible. But like MILLER’S CROSSING and FARGO its depth and moral complexity make it ultimately more rewarding.

The film is set in the homely Californian town of Santa Rosa in 1949. Our hero is Ed Crane, played by Billy Bob Thornton. Ed works as a barber with business partner and brother-in-law Frank (Michael Badalucco) and is stuck in a loveless, superficial marriage to wife Doris (Frances McDormand). They go to church, but only to play bingo, and the closest they get to physical intimacy is when Ed shaves Doris’s legs as she’s reading a magazine in the bath. Ed suspects his wife to be having an affair with affluent department store owner ‘Big’ Dave Brewster (James Gandolfini), so when a shady entrepreneur (Jon Polito) comes in for a haircut (despite wearing a wig) and offering Ed a unique business opportunity, Ed decides to raise the necessary funds by blackmailing Big Dave. However Ed’s plans go awry and before long he is mixed up in a murder trial…

THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE, like many Coen films, is peripherally a pastiche of an old and well-worn cinematic genre – in this case
a pastiche of film noir, and specifically the work of James M Cain, whose bleak and gritty fiction spawned noir classics like THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE and DOUBLE INDEMNITY. Santa Rosa was also the location for Alfred Hitchcock’s SHADOW OF A DOUBT (which Hitch always said was his favourite of his own films) and THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE has Hitchcockian twists in narrative and character. The Coens have also said that they had in mind Forties and Fifties Cold War science fiction (there is more than one reference to Roswell and UFOs) and there is a sense of INVASION OF THE BODYSNATCHERS-style dread and paranoia throughout the film.

The film is anchored by a truly remarkable performance by Thornton as the chain-smoking Ed Crane. Uncannily like Humphrey Bogart in both his facial expressions and laconic delivery, Thornton’s minimalist performance is mesmerizing from beginning to end. The Coens have implied that the movie’s title refers not only to a key element of the plot, but also to Ed’s emotional vacuum, and it speaks volumes for Thornton that he manages to elicit so much sympathy from the audience for such a grim, fatalistic character (“Life has dealt me some bum cards,” says Ed at one point, “or maybe I just haven’t played ‘em right, I don’t know…”). Although he says, “Me, I don’t talk much, I just cut the hair,” Ed does nevertheless narrate the film in voice-over throughout (although the circumstances in which he is relating his tale are not revealed until the last reel of the film). Badalucco, McDormand, and Polito are Coen regulars, and illuminate their respective roles. Scarlett Johansson is enchanting as a young pianist in whom Ed takes a kindly interest, and Tony Shalhoub has a wonderful cameo as smart but callous San Francisco lawyer Freddy Riedenschneider (“You keep your mouth shut! I’m an attorney, you’re a barber – you don&
#8217;t know anything.”) It is also good to see James Gandolfini, better known of course as Tony Soprano, continuing to expand his filmography.

Stylistically THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE is notable for being shot in black and white. Not only is this entirely appropriate for the tone and setting of the film, it also demonstrates how striking and beautiful black and white photography can be when shot and lit to a high standard. British cinematographer Roger Deakins (yet another Coen regular) creates a luminous, entrancing setting for the action, and there are countless unforgettable shots. Music also plays an important part in THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE, and in addition to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata there is a sumptuous score by Carter Burwell (his best since another Coen brothers classic, MILLER’S CROSSING).

Some people might have a problem with the deliberate pacing of the film, but I never once found it too slow. In fact the gentle, almost matter-of-fact fashion in which each twist in the narrative is revealed is in keeping with the vagaries of morality and fate that are thematically central to the film. At one point attorney Riedenschneider makes a reference to Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, upon which he bases his case (“You wanna test something, y’know, scientifically…you look at it. But sometimes, you look at it, your looking *changes* it…”) and it is this kind of creeping unease that permeates every frame of the film.

THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE is also an extremely funny movie. Not funny in a knockabout, hilarious way. Rather it is funny in a dark, deadpan way (think FARGO). An example would be when Ed explains in voice-over Freddy Riedenschneider’s summation to the jury during the second of two trials that take place during the film – “He told them to look not at the facts, but at the meaning of the facts. Then he said the facts had no mea
ning.”

Yet ultimately this is also probably the most poignant film the Coens have ever made, and the final twist in the story is an immensely moving one. Ed Crane, the lowly barber, is a kind of everyman with no understanding of his role in the world, and left helpless at the mercy of his own peculiar destiny (throughout the film he gets away with his own crimes but is blamed for other people’s) “What kind of man are you?” people keep asking Ed throughout proceedings, and his seemingly doomed search for an answer to this question is what drives the film emotionally. In fact the more Ed tells us of his story, the less we really understand him (and the less he understands himself), echoing Riedenschneider’s distillation of the Uncertainty Principle – “The more you look, the less you really know…”

So though it might at first appear to be a rather derivative and formulaic film about a small town barber getting mixed up in murder, blackmail, and infidelity, THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE is actually about deeper issues – fate, identity, guilt, innocence…even, in the end, the meaning of life and death. The likes of DOUBLE INDEMNITY never had an alien visitation or a flashback sequence linked into and out of the main narrative by a spinning hubcap.

THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE is exquisitely realised and - by any reasonable definition of the word - a masterpiece. Or at the very least, it’s the best existential comic sci-fi film noir barbershop film I’ve seen in a long while.

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