The Man Who Wasn't
There
The Man Who Wasn't There on DVD |
In the shorthand that moviegoers use to
describe movies to one another, The Man Who Wasn't There would be "the Coen
brothers do noir." In some ways that's accurate. It's in black and white, and
it features a little man (barber Ed Crane, played by Billy Bob Thornton) who is
overwhelmed by events beyond his control.
But the Coen brothers have already done their noir
film, it was their debut, Blood Simple. They even returned to the territory with Miller's
Crossing, which (quite properly) presented Dashiell Hammet's Red Harvest as a
schizoid cross between the romantic conventions of the 1930s gangster movie and the amoral
intellectual landscape of the late '40s film noir classics.
Besides, I'm not sure anything by the Coens is
"about" what it seems to be about. Remember, these are the guys who titled a
movie Fargo though it doesn't take place there and named a lead character in
another film "The Dude." The Coens are stylists and their movies are
increasingly about expressing that style with wit and polish.
Take the noir connection, for example. Film noir
typically involved a main character who was powerless -- Ed Crane is not so much powerless
as he is insubstantial. Except for Thornton's laconic voice-over narrative, Crane is a
listener in a world filled with talkers. "I don't talk much," he says. It's
true. For most of the film, his character listens, reacts, or doesn't react. He calmly
smokes cigarette after cigarette, staring off into space, listening, perhaps, to an inner
dialogue -- or perhaps luxuriating in the inner silence he never gets to experience in
real life.
And then there's the plot. In structure, it's almost a
mirror image of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice -- that is to say,
everything gets turned around. Thornton, the protagonist, isn't the virile stranger, but
the placid cuckold. The wife and her lover are also reflections of Cain's characters, but
the broad outline is faithful to the source, down to its ironic denouement.
And let's look at the big connection to film noir,
the film's spectacularly striking black-and-white cinematography. To begin with, it turns noir's
convention of a dark world lit by flashes of brilliance on its head. This film is
about light -- it is flooded with light and detail. In The Man Who Wasn't There,
shadows are used as strikingly and sparingly as shafts of light are used in the genre
films.
Even the black-and-white photography is a trick.
Cinematographer Roger Deakins (who also filmed Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy,
Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?) shot the
movie with color film. It was processed to result in a black-and-white image. The
result is a kind of hyper-detailed luminosity completely unlike anything ever shot half a
century ago. No wonder Deakins was nominated for an Academy Award and was recognized by
the American Film Institute, American Society of Cinematographers, British Academy of Film
and Television Arts, Boston Society of Film Critics, and just about everyone else for his
artistry.
None of this cleverness (and there is much more for the
dedicated movie buff to discover, ranging from the names of characters and places to homages
to great film scenes) amounts to a hill of beans if the movie isn't compelling on its own
merits. Possibly the most famous dismissal of The Man Who Wasn't There came from
the French critic Michel Ciment, who called it "a 90-minute film that plays for two
hours.''
There's a kernel of truth to this observation. The film's
pace is, shall we say, deliberate; at times, especially toward the end, you want to
scream, "Get on with it, already!" But that's a reflection of Ed Crane -- he's
not a person who does things. He's not even a person who reacts to situations. He
simply does nothing until action overwhelms him.
Actually, he does do one thing. It is daring and
imaginative and successful, and no one seems more startled by all of this than Crane
himself. But having acted decisively once, he remains inert until his options exhaust
themselves and only one possibility remains.
In other words, the entire film succeeds or fails entirely
upon Billy Bob Thornton's ability to make us believe that such a passive character could
conceivably exist -- and in this, he is spectacularly successful. His Ed Crane is a
triumph of small, telling gestures. His craggy face, too bland even to register emotion,
his almost lifeless eyes (deep inside, something's trapped in there), his mumbling rumble
of a voice -- all of these make us lean in close to the screen. But no one can get close
to Crane; there's nothing solid enough there to approach.
Of course, the other characters have to be slightly bigger
than life in order to make Crane such a non-reactive nebbish, and The Man Who Wasn't
There is packed with actors who are full of juice and life. Francis McDormand is
convincing as Ed's too-vivacious wife, and Michael Badalucco and James Gandolfini are both
flamboyant characters straight out of a Michael Curtiz or Walter Huston film. But no one
in this movie is less than superb. In their quiet ways, Scarlett Johansson and Richard
Jenkins's performances are outstanding, and Tony Shaloub, as always, is a study in
pitch-perfect characterization.
If you buy the pacing as an artistic decision dictated by
the protagonist, it becomes a logical extension of the character -- and character is
destiny here. Faulting any work of art for maintaining internal consistency in the face of
commercial pressure seems a mug's game, anyway. Personally, I was thankful for the
reminder that contemporary films don't have to have a "crisis point" every four
minutes.
Besides, the film is flat-out gorgeous and even if you,
unlike me, don't completely buy its premise, you'll probably ooh and ahh
over its look. Here, the DVD is strongly recommended because it may contain the best, most
detailed transfer of any film I've ever seen. In addition, the biggest extra inducement to
own it is Roger Deakins's interview, which I preferred to the director's commentary track.
It's the real thing, too, not just a thinly disguised ad for the film cobbled together as
part of a promotional campaign.
On the face of it, The Man Who Wasn’t There is
a long-shot recommendation. It certainly wasn't a box-office smash, and its deliberate
pace and passive lead character may be hard for a lot of viewers to cotton to. But it is a
film filled with great performances (and one superlative one from Thornton) and lovely,
lovely bits of technical magic. It's intelligent and plays fair with the viewer, while
also playing with the conventions of a specific genre. Add its gorgeous cinematography and
the pleasure of seeing anything done this well, and you have a movie that'll give you at
least an evening's entertainment. Buy into it as completely as I did and it might even
give you something to think about for years to come.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhometheater.com
|
