Fall has definitely arrived. There have been more quality films in the past two weeks than in the whole of two abysmal summers, with the newest addition to that list being The Man Who Wasn’t There. This is the Coen Brothers’ latest, and it continues their obsession with re-inventing genre, especially film noir. Their movies, including The Big Lebowski, Miller’s Crossing and the recent O Brother, Where Art Thou? have always had a frat-boy type attitude towards the characters, putting them in situations where the audience can laugh at how bizarre it all is. As a result, each of their films is imbued with a sense of dark humor and flippancy about the world and its inhabitants.
The Man Who Wasn’t There is in some ways the Coens’ first serious movie. Not to say that it doesn’t contain its share of strange turns and blackly comic situations, but the Brothers finally treat their characters with some respect. Does anyone honestly take Jeff Lebowski seriously, or Barton Fink, or Marge Gunderson for that matter? Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton) is a serious man, however, so serious that he doesn’t really talk to anyone and so serious that he does not really care that his wife is having an affair with another man. Let me explain.
Ed Crane and his wife Doris (Frances McDormand) live in Santa Rosa, a sleepy California town in the late-1940s. Ed is the local barber, and Doris works at Nirdlinger’s, a department store owned by Big Dave (James Gandolfini), with whom she is having an affair. Ed seems to suspect all of this, yet he has a strangely disaffected air about him. Soon enough, however, Ed wants to move above his station in life as a barber, and in order to finance an entrepreneurial move into the burgeoning dry-cleaning business, he decides to anonymously blackmail Big Dave, threatening to reveal the affair and ruin his standing in town.
The Coen Brothers’ plots never fail to hold interest, yet what dazzles in this film is the cinematography. Shot on color negative and transferred to a black and white print, The Man Who Wasn’t There is pure noir homage; even the opening credits cast shadows. The picture, despite being monochromatic, is lush and full, as opposed to the flat, graininess of many black and white films. While lighting is always key to a movie’s mood, it is absolutely essential to a black and white feature, and the Coens take full advantage of its aesthetic value.
Film noir, arising in Hollywood after World War II, always concerned itself with the moral listlessness of its male characters. To mirror this theme of man adrift in an uncertain world, noir cribbed heavily from German expressionism and threw its anti-heroes into extreme dark and light contrasts, casting protagonists in shadows that often mirrored the state of their souls. The Man Who Wasn’t There uses this effect to its maximum potential, accentuating the harsh contrasts of night and day, throwing shady shadows on shady characters. The stark lighting compositions, for example, cause light coming in windows to flare and shut out any suggestions of an outside world, causing each interior to adopt a hermetic feel that mirrors Ed’s inescapable life.
The film’s themes are also classic noir. Back to the history lesson. Post-World War II, millions of men came home to find their lives radically changed, with society on the brink of atomic war from a strong Soviet threat. If ever there was a time to fall into existential strife, that was it. Such concerns were echoed in film noir, and the existential dilemma of man is personified here in the form of Ed Crane.
The film’s title says it all. This is a man who is not there, at least not completely. Ed hardly has any dialogue (most of it voice-over, another noir standard), doesn’t seem to evince any signs of emotion and appears to be a bit slow. He passes through life almost invisibly, cutting hair and going home. At one point he says, “I was a ghost. I didn’t see anyone and no one saw me.” A chain smoker, Ed appears phantom-like, always swathed in wisps of smoke that cast a mistiness about him. Billy Bob Thornton inhabits Ed perfectly, giving an immensely restrained performance that simultaneously suggests both the emptiness and plenty of the character while also pointing towards the fact that some men may simply not be made for this world.
To Ed, it is a world full of “phonies” and “gabbers.” Everyone talks up a storm while he seems content to live in peaceful silence. Ed is called “an ordinary man, living in a world with no place for him … Modern man.” Is modern man so lost in the world, though? The question that strikes to the core of the film is, “Why is he this way? Is Ed soulless?” The answer may lie in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Huh? Late in the film, one character tries to explain Heisenberg’s theory, encapsulating it to the statement, “Sometimes the more you look, the less you really know.”
The Coen Brothers, who write their own films, have always delighted in the repeated phrase that incurs more meaning as a film progresses. Twice, Ed is asked, “What kind of a man are you?” So the film asks us, what kind of people are we? Is humankind adrift in a world that has lost all certainties, all feelings of security? Recent events might point that way. Is humanity a mass of amoral phonies and gabbers? How often do we really speak without saying anything? One only needs to look around a GOVT-006 class to answer that question. Yet, why are we here and what for? It’s a tough question. So, what’s the answer? Who is Ed Crane and who are we? Cynically enough, the answer may well be that the more we look, the less we really know.
