Flak Magazine: Review of The Man Who Wasn't There, 11-26-01

Note: To make this review accessible to people who haven't seen the film, spoilers are printed in white text that's only visible when highlighted. It's interactive!

Serious in a way that only a comedy can be, Joel and Ethan Coen's The Man Who Wasn't There is a revelation. The brother filmmakers' gifts as savant comedians, unparalleled dialoguists, pitch-perfect period re-creationists, exacting technical wizards and gonzo visualists are so indisputable as to be almost beneath discussion, if only there wasn't so much fun to be had in the discussing. What The Man Who Wasn't There brings to the table is something many will call maturity, but a close reading shows the Coens' movies have never been immature. What this film has is a scope previously unseen in their work, and that the Coens address the film with commensurate effort perhaps means they have never worked so hard to give us so much before.

The Coens have "done noir" many times before — the neo-noir of Blood Simple, the Dashiell Hammett homage Miller's Crossing, the blanc noir of Fargo — but The Man Who Wasn't There isn't coy like those films, which always tweak your nose with artifice. (The Man Who Wasn't There has the artifice, but it puts it to better work.) It's a film noir that takes place in the period in which the great films noir were both set and produced: the mid-to-late '40s and early '50s.

Although shot in almost ludicrously gorgeous black-and-white by Richard Deakins, the movie couldn't really be mistaken for an actual 1950s B movie. At a superficial level, it's because only a handful of shots — the way the camera looks through the windshield at the occupants of a car, or the staging of a car crash — are really of the time; the camerawork looks mostly like the Coens' typical high-gloss production.

The deeper, more telling difference is how The Man Who Wasn't There reflects noir thematically. With the benefit of 50 years' distance and analysis, we can look back at the popular media of the postwar era, filmic and otherwise, and conjecture how it presents the national mood and all of its new, weird components: the Atomic Age and the arms race; modern physics, with all its chaos and quantum uncertainty; the space race and UFOlogy; industrialization and small miracles of technology like dry cleaning and tarmac; the burgeoning middle class and its continued distinction from the upper class; and much, much more. The subtextual murmurs of period pulp fiction can now be fully acknowledged, explicated and brought back as the text itself.

The Coens do just that, funneling the upheaval into a pure, James M. Cain archetype, right down to the hard-boiled narration that, the movie sagely observes, is the child of the pulpy first-person narratives Cain and company penned. Ed (Billy Bob Thornton) is a barber who, in order to acquire the venture capital requested by an entrepreneur, decides to put his suspicion of his wife Doris' (Frances McDormand) affair to the test by blackmailing her supposed lover, Big Dave (James Gandolfini) — a small sin that might even be considered a cuckold's entitlement. But things go wrong; people die. As the law becomes involved, so does Freddy Riedenschneider (Tony Shalhoub), a top-dollar, big-city (well, Sacramento) defense attorney. And, given the movie's inspirations, it's no surprise that things continue to go wrong and people continue to die.

But the plot's ever-more-intricate framework, compelling though it is, more importantly provides a space for a kind of philosophizing that Cain and Hammett would approve of, or even envy. Ed's struggles become — and I'm saying this with a straight face — a proxy battle for the soul of the latter half of the 20th century. More than one character who's been aggrieved by Ed asks him: "What kind of man are you?"

And so what kind of man is Ed? As played by Thornton, with a face that looks as if it were frozen while morphing between Fred MacMurray and Humphrey Bogart, he's even more sympathetic than your average noir's ensnared everyman. He's far from in love with his work — his first line is that, though he works in a barbershop, he never really thought of himself as a barber, but as the movie progresses he begins to reflexively (in all meanings of the term) call himself a barber; it becomes both an accusation and an excuse. He silently curses how averse he is to risk and is beside himself with anxiety when given the opportunity to partner with the entrepreneur. He's affectionate toward his wife, but no longer physically intimate with her, and while their interactions exhibit the comfort of two people who have shared 20 years (as when he shaves her legs), there's no spark, nor even embers. He's drawn to the daughter of a family friend, but not in any way that he knows what to do with. He's willing to risk a death sentence for his wife by not confessing his crime — but that complicity is somewhat mitigated because his confession, when offered, is dismissed. What it boils down to is fundamental decency but total disaffection, resulting in almost supreme indecision punctuated with the occasional resolute action that always turns out badly.

It would be cynical to suggest that those are everyman qualities; then again, there's never been a more cynical film genre. This may be why the Coens keep returning to it: It keys into their warm-yet-dim view of people. In their movies, the Coens have always given dumb people over to their vices and let them dangle. Almost all criticism of their work comes back to the question of whether they have affection or contempt for their characters; I think the clear regard shown for the protagonists of their last two films, The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou, settles the matter conclusively. The Man Who Wasn't There offers still more support; not even Fargo's Marge was so sympathetically presented.

The film also explores one of the great noir sub-themes: the danger of knowledge, the man who knew too much. "Knowledge is a curse," declares one character, and the movie also says it implicitly many times. What's interesting is how often it says it explicitly, and then comments on it. Riedenschneider doesn't want the truth; "it stinks," he repeats, instead asserting that in arbitration-based law it's enough to show that the other side doesn't know everything — not truth, but (reasonable) doubt. And he hauls out the big guns: Heisenberg's principle that the act of observing disturbs the observed; put another way, the more you look at something, the more you can't understand it. Ed relates that the lawyer tells the jury "not to look at the facts but at the meaning behind the facts; and then he said the facts had no meaning" — it's enough to make you remember what postmodernism is all about.

And then, as far as the question of knowledge is concerned, the coup de grace: Doris's suicide upon learning that she's pregnant by her lover. This is interesting on a whole host of levels, but the fundamental glory of it is how it negates everything that's come before: Obviously, she was impregnated before Big Dave was killed, and there's no chance that it's her husband's child, meaning that the truth of the affair and its ramifications — the leverage that makes a blackmailer out of Ed — would have come to light just weeks later. That kind of cosmic irony is rife in film noir, and the Coens get all kinds of bonus points for not neglecting it.

There's a last, poignant layer to this, a harmony that riffs on the theme of knowledge: communication. While the Coens' dialogue allow for plenty of opportunities to elaborate on the topic, the instance most worth mentioning here is the way that Ed and his wife never talk, can't talk. It accommodates that taciturn quality that noir heroes like Ed are supposed to have, but all throughout his narration, Ed rails against this — in his guilt, he's desperate to talk meaningfully with his wife. Then saying, at the end of his life, how he anticipates the afterlife for a chance to tell his wife (I'm paraphrasing, just a bit) "all the things we don't have words for in this world." How sweet, and how sad.

At one level, it's a disservice to the art and craft of the cast and crew to talk about the merits of the film at this length but not address their contributions. But there's not much more to say except that everyone rises to the level of the film in accordance with how much is asked. McDormand makes the most of the scenes she's given, but the movie's meat goes to Thornton, Gandolfini and Shalhoub, who all give, if not career-best performances, then serious contenders.

There's something of a grace-note scene near the end where a renowned piano teacher explains that what the fingers do — technical skill — can be taught. What can't be taught is the passion that those fingers can only hope to channel. It's more of a wink-nudge moment than the Coens tend to include in their films, but not overbearingly so; nevertheless, it's them drawing a line in the sand to all the critics who think they're all style, no heart. The Man Who Wasn't There is all style and all heart, so much so that it shines a light back onto their whole filmography. Their naysayers have long said the brothers are just merry pranksters thumbing their noses at the rest of the world, but this movie's serious-minded exploration of the human condition asserts that they're comedians in the tradition of the greats.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)