"The Man Who Wasn't There"

Another cool, near-perfect puzzler from the Coen Brothers, this time a noir sendup. Ho-hum.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Oct 31, 2001 | As my friend who loves the Coen Brothers' movies said the other night, after we had sat through their latest cool, near-perfect puzzler, "I guess their problem is that basically they don't have anything to say." This is more of a problem for me than for my friend, generally speaking, and I found "The Man Who Wasn't There" -- a loving evocation of the lower-middle-class 1940s noir world of James M. Cain -- a frustrating experience even by Coen standards.

I prefer the Coens in their charming goofball mode, when they structure their all-style-no-substance tributes to movie history around a comic-heroic central figure: Nicolas Cage in "Raising Arizona," Jeff Bridges in "The Big Lebowski," George Clooney in "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"

Seen in retrospect, even my favorite of the Coens' films, the pseudo-profound "Barton Fink," looks more like absurdist comedy than meaningful satire. Mind you, I have no problem with that; the Coens can't resist these deluded and pathetic lunkheads who must confront a ludicrous universe, and their comedies usually provide at least a convincing simulation of warmth and humanity.

I'm much more mixed on the Coens' neo-noirs and imitation genre pictures. I haven't disliked any of their later movies as much as I did "Blood Simple," their very black, much-lauded 1984 debut. But some of the same soulless sadism, the same juvenile-geek urge to out-Hitchcock Hitchcock, resurfaced in "Miller's Crossing" and even later in "Fargo" (redeemed as that was by the performance of Frances McDormand). Of course I understand that for many of the Coens' fans their bravura appropriation of style and sensibility, their amoral mix 'n' match movie-hound aesthetic, is precisely the source of their appeal. Perhaps the reported title of their next project, "Intolerable Cruelty," is meant to tweak weepy old-fashioned humanists like me.

"The Man Who Wasn't There," like "Fargo," is to some extent an effort to bridge the gap between the Coens' comedy and thriller modes. On the surface it's purest formalism: masterful black-and-white cinematography (by Roger Deakins, the Coens' customary co-conspirator), note-perfect character acting and period diction. I mean, these guys pay attention to the friggin' details: When Doris Crane (played by McDormand, who in real life is married to director Joel Coen), the main character's alcoholic and perhaps unfaithful wife, gets drunk at an Italian family picnic, she says the word "goddamn" with the precise inflection of a mid-century woman unaccustomed to cursing. Another character says "the out-of-doors" rather than the more contemporary "outdoors."

Specifically, "The Man Who Wasn't There" is meant to seem like a companion piece to Billy Wilder's 1944 "Double Indemnity" or Tay Garnett's 1946 "The Postman Always Rings Twice" (both based on Cain novels). We've got a tangled web of family money, unhappy marriages, stifled dreams, greed, adultery and murder. In Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton), the small-town California barber whose misguided attempt to escape his lot in life ignites the drama, we've got a narrator-protagonist so inscrutable that the more he talks the less we really know about him.

This is the point of the film in some ways: No one can ever remember Ed's name or place him in context; when he does something bad he gets away with it, and the things he gets blamed for he didn't do. But this sure doesn't make it any easier to like or understand Ed. Like so many other Coen characters -- and, it must be said, so many characters in classic film noir -- he seems like a laboratory animal trapped in a cage of elaborate and beautiful construction.

Next Page: Billy Bob Thornton: Handsome and decrepit

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