As well as a genre homage,
another showcase for Coens spot-on comedy of an on-his-feet lawyer’s
professional song and dance
Eleventh
in a series: Post-9/11 Blues,
Internet-infected Brave New World: A
revisiting of 2001-10 pop (and political) culture
(My 2016 updates of reviews on A Serious Man and Burn After Reading could have been 11th and 12th
in this series, but they weren’t, because their first versions were done before
I started the decade-banner procedure, hence the 2016 versions are “outside”
the decade categories. If that makes any sense.)
Also fits this series: America
through a Coens’-eye lens
Subsections below:
The Coens are as American as the old autos in Havana, if more modern than them
This film’s focus on paying homage to an old American genre may sharpen
its appeal for some and drop it for others
A handful of colorful characters define the ramped-up noir plot
This film may serve as a sort of artistic signpost for the Coens
[Edit 4/18/16.]
I wanted to do right by this
film, since I had immersed myself (starting last year) in covering most of the
Coens brothers’ films. And I actually have two blog mini-series in the works,
not on films, that I think my audience will find quite interesting, in
different ways (each covers a quite different but tasty topic). But The Man Who Wasn’t There seems like an
example of, along with other worthwhile features I cover below, what
encompasses “stoner humor” in the Coens’ work. That is, whether this concept of
humor is fair to use to sum up some aspects of the Coens’ work, definitely
there is a fair amount of playful, quirky, surface-aimed humor throughout their
oeuvre, especially in the first 15 years or so of their career.
Fargo (1996) seems to have shown them a “more profitable way,” a
way to marry a stark look at criminality and violence; a detailed and smart way
of focusing on the homely aspects of American life; and a humor that in this
case seems warmhearted compared to some of their other exercises in humor. From
then on, when they could be more realistic in depicting the concrete “essences”
of American life, their films could be more satisfying, at least to a segment
of their fans.
The Man seems like a film that is primarily interested in
delivering a noir story that, in general, isn’t terribly funny, and is somewhat
dour. It also does it with an antihero who seems to exemplify what may make the
Coens an acquired taste: a willingness to embrace old tropes of mid-to-later
twentieth-century literature—of antiheroes or just Shmoes in noirish situations,
led to calamity by their weaknesses or starkly bad luck; and it also shows how
you can watch a Coens film and marvel at how well it is crafted, without being
so much in the grip of an overarching story you love. If you compare Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), you can watch
Sterling Hayden portray a psychopathic general who expounds on his theory of
the nefarious Communist conspiracy to sap and contaminate our precious bodily
fluids, and because he fits in a story whose whole is gripping, we are
entranced and tickled to see the self-serious general deliver his palaver with
a puff of cigar smoke at the end.
But when in The Man a store owner’s wife turns up at the front door looking
like an addlepated spook, and talks a bit crazy, we get a laugh at how she
looks, and marvel at how well the funny shot was made. But this is like what sets
stoners to laughing: how a certain face or gesture looks, how a voice comes out
“weird,” momentarily. This is not being fully engaged with whatever business is
at hand (whether or not it is a necessitated consequence of whatever the Coens
feel about marijuana and its effects). And it is something that pops up a lot
in the Coens’ work, which some critics might say so often seems to amount to
sequences or pieces that flow past, not always cohering in a grand story. This
isn’t to say this film is wholly
disappointing; but it does make it rather hard to write about, in terms of
drawing out themes that “live beyond it and yet are key to understanding it.”
You end up concerned with a lot of details, however well these are handled.
Perhaps this whole issue will be
most in focus when I cover The Big
Lebowski (1998), which actually has a stoner as its main character, and
also has a cult following that reminds me of what appends to The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). I
hope to fashion an appreciative review of Lebowski,
but I know it won’t be easy for me.
##
I first saw
The Man Who Wasn’t There on, I
believe, videotape several years ago (2007?), and I know it was before I
started watching Coens films more methodically (or just repeatedly), which has
definitely happened by about 2012. Generally, I started watching them more
often since about 2008, but I can’t
specifically
date my seeing
this film before then.
I make this fussy distinction because when I first saw this film, I know I
found it like a rather sterile technical exercise—well crafted, but not
something you can terribly get wrapped up in (by virtue of an overarching plot
or a particularly interesting character arc)—not something to love, for its
whole self. (That is, to the extent you can do this with other Coens films.) But
when I watched it the past few weeks, I was more appreciative of it—but I think
this was largely for how it embodies a lot of Coens traits, some very good. But
it still has left me a bit cool, to the point where I have a little trouble
writing a good review of it, even after ratcheting up my effort and associated
enthusiasm.
I think this film gets described
as the Coens doing a take on
James M. Cain (cf. Leonard Maltin’s thumbnail review). By the way, if you feel I ought to be
a good one to analyze the Coens, I appreciate a lot of what they do, but I
often feel that they would have rabid fans that would have a better handle than
I do on the totality of their pet features—such as (among other traits)
cross-references to their other films (even the sharing, between films, of
certain character names, or certain phrases or perhaps whole
lines); their sprinkling in philosophic
pronouncements; and the mixing of tones, even within one film. They can manage
to be intellectually rigorous and precisely witty, and self-conscious in their
self-referential bits, without (usually) coming across as pretentious—and this
is largely because their films are often very amusing (for those who like
“college-level” films). It’s just that, often, I find that some of their films
are verbal enough, and maybe enough of a technical exercise that wears thin on
repeated viewings, that I feel their scripts would work well in a print
anthology—and they may eventually be handled that way, in future Norton
anthologies of American literature, there among Herman Melville, Stephen Crane,
Ernest Hemingway, and more modern figures.
The Coens are as American as the old autos in Havana, if more modern than them
They are also a very American
sort of pair of artists; I was just thinking the other day, in the wake of a 60 Minutes story on how blockbuster
American films are crafted partly with an eye to how they’ll play to a Chinese
audience (and there is the burgeoning ferment of U.S.–Chinese coproductions),
that Coens stories are typically not the sort of thing that would translate
well to a lot of foreign markets. Maybe some Europeans would like them, especially
the French (the way they liked the arty and angled Orson Welles); but I can’t
imagine some of these very American (Coens) stories playing well in places like
Singapore or Madagascar. I mean, if Third World audiences saw the U.S. depicted
as a place of nasty crime, nefarious conspiracies spiraling out of control, and
so on, how would we maintain our glowing reputation (to the point of ready
immigration, and our products snapped up abroad) for being a permanent
cornucopia of milk and honey and an even break, or at least of flashy,
transporting films to see in the local theater (complete with fantastic creatures
and/or jaunty heroes)?
The Coens, it seems, at least in
good part conform with an American literary tradition that goes back at least to
Mark Twain, where a brilliant writer in frontier areas could come up with
stories, inspired by rambunctious local life, that could both burst with
generous humor and yet show the average clunker on the street to often be a
knave’s knave. (The Coens also are big on mid-twentieth-century crime fiction,
which I have only a very-partial but tickled appreciation of, and which I don’t
go ape over quite as the Coens do. This means my commenting on this aspect of
the film at hand will have a sort of marginal place here.)
I have also commented in other
entries on their films, starting in 2012 and refining my opinion as I go along,
as to their showing a Jewish sensibility of irony, but of course they’re about
more than that. Thus, though their A
Serious Man (2009) takes an unusually fond approach to looking humorously
at a local Jewish-American community, compared to the more vinegary Burn After Reading (2008), this isn’t
merely the Coens’ being Jews provincially favoring their own and scorning goys;
not by a long shot. Lots of artists with a satiric bent will be gentler, on
some level, on their own “kind,” at least if this kind is one subject to a lot
of hard bias (and worse) over the many years.
But the Coens have also worked
within a production universe knowing (or confronting the chance money-deal
reality) that their films have to play in some other countries. Thus the
question becomes (for the director and the producers), how best angle a story
to do that? A Serious Man could play
better in Europe if (aside from its look at particularly American features of
daily-tchotchke life) it seemed focused in good part on the potential for
absurdity and a man’s moral response to this; and of course, making American
Jews look especially like foolish rubes would not play well in Israel, where
the film was also released, to apparently a good reception.
This film’s focus on paying homage to an old American genre may sharpen
its appeal for some and drop it for others
When it comes to
The Man Who Wasn’t There, maybe the
French cinephiles could appreciate the photography, and the generally dark moral
atmosphere. Interestingly, the film was shot in color, and then in making the
distributable product, photographically transferred into black-and-white. There
is a long interview of cinematographer
Roger Deakins on the DVD where he discusses various technical aspects. If you like this sort
of thing about photography, it’s an interesting interview; it gets a bit
tedious with the rather sycophantic interviewer going a little trivial at
times. But Deakins reveals that the film was made in color in order to
distribute it in some particular market abroad—and this was a condition of
getting funding—where a color “video” version could be available. (
End note.)
As people also know who
understand (even partway, as I do) the problem of changing a color photo into
black-and-white, you have to be aware of certain colors that don’t translate
well into B&W. For instance, certain reds can look black, where you might
not want that in a shot. Thus, I would suggest that Deakins shot the film in
the “textbook” way the film’s Wikipedia article talks about (“The lighting is
textbook, with quarter-light setups”) with his trying to make it easiest to
have both watchable color and B&W versions from the same film stock.
Anyway, the B&W version is
nice to look at. But the fact that doing a B&W film even by 2000-01 would
have made things tough for the Coens’ getting financing, including with an eye
to overseas markets, shows this sort of work has long been hard to do. (It’s
also been said, in what context I forget, that B&W filming is today more
expensive than color, to the point of being prohibitive.) And especially today,
this sort of old-time-genre-aping film probably would lose the interest of just
about everyone whose lively brain is routinely intermeshed with a smartphone.
The bottom line is that this is
a very American sort of film—a homage to late-1940s noir, and to Cain-type
fiction—and is about American-type situations: average Joes working in a barber
shop, or working in a local department store, with blackmail, murder, and legal
maneuvering entering into the mix. (The Wikipedia article also comments on the
film’s being shot consistently at eye level, as if this added to its rather
humdrum style. But this misses the point that the film is a study in looking at
a set of experiences from the main character’s perspective, even if he is a bit
of a dullard. This sort of thing risks having limited appeal, just as the
B&W photography does. But if you’re a Coens fan, you appreciate how well
the film is crafted, anyway.) [Added 4/18/16: I forgot to mention that the film is heavy with voiceover narration by the lead character, which adds a fair amount of the dry comedy.]
(Among the ways you tend to look
at technique or passing trivia rather than get swept up in the story is that,
at least for me, I found
Billy Bob Thornton—whose
performance, going along with his homespun, chiseled face, is etched enough for
the narrow character he plays—seems to risk shaving a ton of years off his life
with the amount of smoking he does: he seems to have a cigarette in just about
every shot he’s in.)
Twenty-five years ago, this might
have seemed a fine contender for an Oscar in the U.S. market. Today, it seems
quite out of style: where’s the American-made superhero? Nowadays, about the
only blue-collar-type homeslice in the States—someone at all on a par with Ed
Crane, the central character here—who could still intersect with the values of
a world-spanning superhero is Bruce Springsteen.
A handful of colorful characters define the ramped-up noir plot
As often happens with a Coens
film, you can go far in summarizing this one by just listing and explaining
some story aspects of the main characters. And because I feel like I ought to
expedite this review, that’s what I’ll do.
Some of the actors are people
who’ve either appeared in Coens films before and/or would appear in them later.
Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton, who also appears in the Coens’
Intolerable Cruelty [2003]) is the
taciturn, always-smoking barber who works in a shop owned by his wife’s
brother, also a barber,
Frank Raffo
(played by
Michael Badalucco, who played
“Baby Face” Nelson in
O Brother, Where
Art Thou? [2000]). Frank’s father Augustus started the barber shop, hence
it is called Guzzi’s (the father’s nickname).
Doris Crane (
Frances McDormand,
who has appeared in many Coens films, all the way back to
Blood Simple [1984]) is Ed’s wife, and sister of Frank, and hence
is the reason Frank got the unpretentious (let’s say) job as a barber. As
McDormand describes her (as she understands her), Doris comes from a large
Italian family, and wants to distance herself from it a bit (in fact, McDormand
in this film doesn’t really come across as an Italian-American—which probably
suits her “assimilationist” character), and her being drawn to work at
Nerdlinger’s department store in town (Santa Rosa, California, which apparently
is near Sacramento) is due to its being the big focus of glamour in town. Doris also is developing a drinking problem, and as the
film takes pains to show, she and Ed don’t have much of a marriage (in terms of
talking and understanding each other).
David (“Big Dave”) Brewster (
James Gandolfini, in his only outing with the Coens, in 2000 early
in his
Sopranos career) is the general
manager of Nerdlinger’s, and Doris is having an affair with him, which Ed picks
up on without going to passionate lengths to hold his wife to account for it.
(Ed is generally rather lethargic as a person, though he occasionally acts on
ideas that appeal to him such as serving a minor career change. The film uses
as a central premise what a dullard and “low-metabolism” character he is—he is
a Coens antihero—which helps define, I think, the limitations of appeal of this
film, for some.)
So now we have the main
ingredients of a typical noir staple, the threesome of an adultery triangle.
Now we need something else to set the falling dominoes of the plot into motion.
Creighton Tulliver (
Jon Polito,
who had worked with the Coens before) is a seeming traveling business-startup
type, though it’s unclear (to me) if he isn’t just a bait-and-switch con man.
With a jovial manner of sales patter, he turns up in the barber shop, with Ed
allowing to cut his hair after Frank has grumpily asserted the shop is closed
per normal business hours. Creighton piques Ed’s interest in the dry-cleaning
business. This turn-in-career, as the Coens in the making-of doc show is their
humorous premise that got the whole story (and a way to attract producer
interest) going, is the catalyst of the plot for the rest of the film, as
calamitous as the plot turns become: Ed wants to get out of the doldrums of
being a barber and thinks entering the dry cleaning field is a way to do it.
Creighton just needs startup
capital from a “silent partner” (which is normally a valid kind of business
partner); Creighton will run the business, and he and his putative silent
partner will split profits 50/50. $10,000 is what he needs. Eventually Ed can
get it, and he does so by blackmailing Big Dave.
Creighton, by the way, is a gay
who makes a pass at Ed when Ed has produced the money. Ed, in one of his few
shows of indignant emotion, rejects this as boundary-crossing. Creighton’s
being a homosexual becomes a hook that defines how he is described in the rest
of the film, as the “pansy”—this film, whose story year is 1949, trucks in
hardbitten-man’s slang of its time (e.g., Japanese are “Japs” and “Nips”). (So,
as a modern-day film, there’s a definite flavor of being before the era of
Caitlyn Jenner.)
Anne Nerdlinger (
Katherine Borowitz)
is the wife of Big Dave, who seems rather stiff and wordless (as at a dinner
party); she is part of the family that started the department store—and it’s
interesting that the two men, Ed and Dave, who are in the adultery triangle but
also kick off the plot developments that define the tragedy here, have both
gotten their careers, Ed’s banal and Dave’s more prestigious, via their wives’
families’ businesses.
Anne makes a most memorable
impression when, after Dave’s death, she turns up at Ed’s door one night, her
appearance (and kooky wide eyes) giving the sort of humorous effect that is
typical of this film—you laugh at minor things that show the comedy is woven in
(like glittery threads) via details but not so much as if the characters as
recognizably and thoroughgoingly comic carry you along with a gripping plot (as
you might see, say, in Dr. Strangelove).
Anne at the door, at night, talking about having seen a flying saucer years
before shows her to be going a little screwy, with her appearance allowing you
a snort of laughter.
##
When Dave has Ed join him in a
talk at Nerdlinger’s and Dave confesses to having been in an affair, and that
now he is being blackmailed, Dave suspects it is the “pansy” who is
blackmailing him, the same pansy who has also approached him, as he had Ed,
about getting $10,000 to start a dry-cleaning business. Dave is broken
up—Gandolfini gives a sharp performance, but despite how he gets associated (in
passing, marketing-wise allusions) with this film, his screen time isn’t
terribly big, compared to other, side performers.
Later, Dave calls Ed to the
store to talk again, and this time, Dave has discovered that it is Ed who has
been blackmailing him. The dark, suspense-filled, confrontational scene is pretty
well done—Dave reveals he had approached the pansy and beaten him, and inferred
Ed’s role that way (much later in the film, we will find that Creighton has
been killed and deposited in the bottom of a lake, and it seems [I think] that
Dave had killed him, but Ed gets arrested and charged with his murder. It’s
that kind of neo-noir film).
In the confrontation at the
store, a violent scuffle ensues, and Ed kills Dave, in a move perhaps he didn’t
know would be lethal.
Of all the weird plot twists and
turns, Doris, Ed’s wife, gets arrested and
charged with Dave’s murder. Some suggestions that her books—she is the
Nerdlinger’s accountant—have been cooked obsess/concern her, if it weren’t
simply [I think] the prosecution’s evidentiary sine qua non for arresting her.)
In the wake of this, Ed meets up with the father of
Rachel “Birdie” Abundas (
Scarlett Johansson, who wouldn’t work with the Coens again until
this year’s
Hail, Caesar!), whom Ed
has already appreciated playing the piano at Nerdlinger’s. The father,
Walter Abundas (
Richard Jenkins, who would work again with the Coens on the
following
Intolerable Cruelty and
Burn After Reading [2008]), is a
small-town lawyer who, as the Coens humorously draw out, specializes in
probate, real estate, and title searches. Walter suggests X attorney for Ed,
but if Ed wants the
really best, go
for
Freddie Riedenschneider (
Tony Shalhoub, who appears in
Barton Fink [1991]).
Freddie is a competent
criminal-defense attorney who comes to Santa Rosa
to set up temporary camp while he is to represent Doris.
He stays at a motel, eats at a local not-cheap restaurant, and will hire a
private detective—this is going to be an expensive proposition. Ed’s
brother-in-law Frank willingly mortgages the barber shop to pay for Freddie for
Doris. (This is a noble deed that, in effect, will not go unpunished, in the
plot.)
A few of the choice scenes, for
me, include when Freddie meets with Ed and Doris at the prison, and (in the
first meeting) feels out possibilities for strategy for the defense. As the
comedy has it, Ed even confesses to the crime, but Freddie responds as if Ed is
just lying to try to protect his wife, and dismisses that it would really work
in court. The second meeting, with striking photography with bright light
coming from above into a dark room, contains some of the most deliberate
intellectual baubles of the film, which may turn some off here as the Coens
being self-consciously philosophical. Shalhoub handles the explicating
discussion well, and his most lengthy scenes throughout the film remind you of
Miles Massey (George Clooney) in Intolerable
Cruelty, who I think does Shalhoub one better regarding slick lawyerly
argumentation. The Coens are very good with satirizing (or “comically
admiring”) lawyers without the portrayal being a low-grade, contemptuous
burlesque.
Just when you think Freddie will
do a bang-up job representing Doris, a big
plot turn shoves the story into a new direction, and I save that for you, if
you want to see this film. About 20-25 minutes more story follows, including
with Ed wanting to be a business manager for Birdie if she proved acceptable to
a piano coach he takes her to. The last 20 or so minutes of the film may seem,
while consistent with what’s gone before, labored and a bit patience-trying,
and are what could cement your view that this film is a Coens tour de force, in
the not-so-positive sense.
This film may serve as a sort of artistic signpost for the Coens
There are a few playful visual
tricks, such as with a hubcap (from a car accident) rolling a long distance
along the ground, the camera roving alongside it, which somewhat reminds you of
the previous film,
O Brother.
Dennis Gassner, the Coens' occasional production
designer (who worked in films at least as early as
Apocalypse Now [1979]), is praised at a few points in the making-of
doc, and he seems to comport with the Coens as essential to them in the more
playful, loopy period of their career, which covers a bit more than the Coens
films he worked on, several from
Miller’s
Crossing (1991) to
O Brother. (He
also worked on
The Ladykillers
[2004].) Once Jess Gonchor was the Coens’ regular production designer starting
with
No Country for Old Men (2007),
then their fare seemed more often to hew to realistic scenes, and I happen to
like them more when they are in this mode.
Accordingly, The Man Who Wasn’t There seems like
(along with being a kind of purist technical exercise that has its merits) a
sort of transition from their loopier period to their more realistic, post-2001
period. (Which period you like better defines the kind of Coens fan you are.)
If that seems like too facile an assessment, I think it’s easier to say The Man is a good springboard for
discussing the pros and cons of The Big
Lebowski (1998).
That is, I was aware as I
grappled with The Man that it
probably primed me (in terms of dealing with something I didn’t love) for
settling down to do a solid review of The
Big Lebowski. This will provide my first “Summer Lite” review of the year,
whenever it comes (perhaps in May).
End note. Deakins also does some commenting on a technical aspect
that I could barely appreciate, that when dailies were done, they were
developed in black-and-white in a way that looked better than the finished
film, with how it was differently developed. Something like that.
