director
Joel Coen
screenwriters
Joel Coen
Ethan Coen
producer
Ethan Coen
music
Carter Burwell
cinematographer
Roger Deakins
editors
"Roderick Jaynes"
(the Coens)
Tricia Cooke
cast
Billy Bob Thornton (Ed Crane)
Frances McDormand (Doris Crane)
James Gandolfini (Big Dave Nirdlinger)
Michael Badalucco (Frank)
Katherine Borowitz (Ann Nirdlinger)
Jon Polito (Creighton Tolliver)
Scarlett Johansson (Birdy Abundas)
Richard Jenkins (Walter Abundas)
Tony Shalhoub (Freddy Riedenschneider)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 116m
u.s.
release: November 2,
2001
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other coen
bros. films
reviewed on this website:
- barton
fink
- the
big lebowski
- blood
simple
- fargo
- the
hudsucker proxy
- intolerable
cruelty
- the
ladykillers
- miller's
crossing
- o
brother, where art thou?
- raising
arizona
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After a couple of frisky larks
-- the stoner rhapsody The
Big Lebowski and the yodelling fable O
Brother, Where Art Thou? -- Joel and Ethan Coen are back
cruising the streets of film noir mood and menace in The
Man Who Wasn't There. This will likely be the only Coen film
ever to share its title with a 3-D sex comedy, and I have no
doubt that the Coens, whose roots are in '80s grindhouse (Joel
helped edit Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead), knew about the
1983 film with Steve Guttenberg as an invisible man visiting,
among other places, a girls' shower room. So the title is prankish
and deliberately pulpy; the film's style itself is austere and
crisp (Roger Deakins did the black-and-white photography), but
the Coens are still jokers at heart, and the movie is a joke
of the driest, most deadpan kind.
The deadpan starts with Billy
Bob Thornton as Ed Crane, a barber who seems spiritually immobilized,
and you quickly understand why the Coens cast Thornton -- he
has the fatalistic slouch of a Bogart or a Mitchum, and for the
first time here he has a more promising camera face than his
wife's. Ed's thoroughgoing quietude in any situation is good
for uneasy laughs, and we also hear his narration, which does
not sound as if he's telling this story at poolside in the Bahamas.
Thornton looks and speaks uncannily like a B-movie actor circa
1949 (when the film is set), except it's an A-movie performance
-- Thornton does wonders within the tabula rasa of words
and gestures he's limited to.
Ed wants to be more than a
barber, but doesn't know how; he has resigned himself to what
he has come to see as an unexciting life, with an unexciting
wife, Doris (Coen staple Frances McDormand, who enjoys one of
the funnier drunken scenes on film). When an oily hustler (Jon
Polito, who can always be counted on to add some oil to a Coen
film) offers to bring Ed in on a get-rich-quick scheme involving
dry cleaning -- if Ed will just kick in $10,000 -- Ed accepts,
then goes about figuring out how to get the money. As luck would
have it, Doris is cheating on him with Big Dave (James Gandolfini,
filling John Goodman's usual role), her boss; Ed decides to blackmail
Big Dave. Of course, it's far from that simple.
As I've said before, noir
is not about plot twists so much as a general doomed-from-birth
attitude solidified by the plot twists, which act as one door
after another slamming shut behind our hero until he's trapped
by his own animal desperation. The Man Who Wasn't There
is awfully short on animal desperation, or animal anything, which
is part of the Coens' sly up-ending of the genre. Ed has no inner
life, no passion; the closest he comes to the latter is his fondness
for a young girl (Scarlett Johansson) who plays piano -- he takes
an interest in her talent and thinks there's a career in it for
her. But even then he's such a lukewarm cod that when the girl
calls him an "enthusiast," the very idea of him being
enthused gets one of the script's weirdest laughs.
In true Coen form, the following
things happen: blood flows ostentatiously; a large man screams
at the camera (a favorite Coen visual); said camera fixates on
a particular action (a woman's leg being shaved) only to bring
it out again later for an ironic curtain call; and once again,
the pursuit of money brings only damnation. The Coens give us
heroes with reasonable enough goals, who resort to unreasonable
tactics to achieve them; part of the comedy of their work is
that the consequences are so out of proportion to the characters'
basic intent, and this is why the Coens have often been labelled
wanton boys pulling the wings off flies.
Here, at least, the absurdist
cruelty has context; as Ed slumps through one misfortune after
another, he becomes a walking commentary on an entire genre.
The Man Who Wasn't There may not be as immediately engaging
as the Coens' other movies -- it has few fanciful "Coen
moments" and will be the least likely film in the portfolio
to be watched and cackled over repeatedly -- but it's still a
gorgeous piece of work, as different from the Coens' other films
as the other films are from each other. Even a mere Coen exercise
in style is worthwhile, because they not only have style, they
understand it.
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