El hombre que nunca estuvo

The 2002 Cohen brothers film is a delight. "The Man Who Wasn't There" combines everything I like in the Coen brother's unique way of telling a story. From the comic of the situation witnessed in the famous "O Brother Where Art Though" (2000) to the originality of the scenario seen in "Barton Fink" (1991), not to mention the singularity of the characters and their lack of control over the situation in the excellent "Fargo" (1996), all those "hints" have been gathered to built this well thought story. Joel and Ethan directed and wrote this picture about a bored and boring chain-smoking barber admirably played by Billy Bob Thornton (best role for this under-rated actor)who blackmails his wife's boss and lover for money to invest in dry cleaning. As you sense the plan goes terribly wrong. I believe this story is a pretext to show us how little is our grip on the reality of our lives. And to demonstrate how justice easily becomes a comico-pathetic masquarade when given by men. On the contrary true Justice eventually lies in the wrinkles of men's destiny. As a conclusion you are better off expecting a landing of an alien spaceship than a fair and clear trial in a court of law. Whether we agree or not to this demonstration, it does not take away the pleasure of watching these terrific actors putting into play the original and dark scenario of the two brothers. Billy Bob Thornton is a master portraying to perfection Ed Crane (the laconic barber). Since Dead Man (1995) I don't recall a lot of movies where directors have capitalized on his enormous talent. Frances McDormand (Doris Crane) is as usual fantastic. We remember her in Wonder Boys (2000) and of course as the sheriff in Fargo (1996). Here she plays wonderfully the barber's wife going from bitterness to sorrow. Some characters can be seen as "cliche" like Freddy Riedenschneider the lawyer played by the good Tony Shalhoub, however they are all enjoyable to watch: James Gandolfini is terrific as "Big Dave" and Jon Polito very colorful as Creighton Tolliver, not to forget the very talkative and sincere Michael Badalucco as Franck Raffo or the great job done by Scarlett Johansson in the role of Rachael 'Birdy' Abundas the not very straight and quiet adolescent you would expect. The Black and White picture is more an artistic exploration from the Coen brothers and I don't think has anything to do with the chosen period (late 40's). However the black and white picture is very well shot by Roger Deakins and impose tremendously well Billy Bob Thornton's character and therefore never becomes a burden for the audience. "The Man Who Wasn't There" does not belong to any genre in particular. The Movie is made of a myriads of genres and characters that the Coen brothers have managed to master throughout their career of story tellers. The movie is a "film Noir" but not only, it is a dark comedy but not only, it is a light thriller but not only, it is shot in black and white but still have colorful characters, it tells a simple story of a laconic barber but there is more to it, eventually Justice will prevail but not the way we think it will. In the end it is a unique movie and in times where everything seems to look the same this movie becomes a true jewel.

It is beautifully and refreshingly unpretentious. It is acted and filmed with grace and delicacy. This is the kind if movie we hope to find while sitting through most of the glitz and superficiality that gets made. Without question worth eight bucks, and two hours of your evening. Score another one for the Coen brothers.

Billy Bob Thornton has the perfect face for film noir. His craggy, drawn features lead up to sunken but large and staring eyes, and cheeks that look to be made out of plaster. Particularly when shot in black and white, his face becomes a landscape of shifting shadows, while he doesn't move a muscle. He is able to give the impression of a man at war with himself even while sitting perfectly still and staring ahead. He's Jeremy Irons, only without that unsettling accent. The Coen brothers take great advantage of their stars' granite physiognomy throughout "The Man That Wasn't There," constructing several shots around Thornton staring into a point just slightly away from the camera, impassive as an Easter Island head, moving only to smoke an ever-present cigarette while the obligatory noir voice-over narration runs. His voice is perfect, too: a kind of calm, measured rumbling, which describes incredible events but never seems amazed by them. Thornton says "I don't talk much," and it's true: he doesn't do much either, but he is still fascinating, and commands our attention.

The Coens take great relish in the noir conventions, even beyond the 1940s setting and the black and white photography (let's face it, we're so used to '40s movies in black and white that color would look a little weird). The story follows classic lines (with a few wild divergences): Thornton's character is a barber in one of those small postwar California towns that Hitchcock was so enamored of. He comes up with a scheme to raise some money, which naturally spins a little beyond what he anticipated. That's all I can say in good conscience, and the plot goes pretty far afield (I mean REALLY far afield, catering to fans both of Dashiell Hammett and "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers"). But really, you know what to expect, if you've ever seen one of these movies before: greed, dark secrets, and murder, in a world of fedoras, cigarette smoke, snapping lighters, and deep moral turpitude. A world where nothing or no one is what they seem, and the only sure thing is that, in the end, some sap is gonna get it.

As good as Thornton is, he can't carry the movie alone. Fortunately, he is surrounded by a top-notch cast, including a lot of familiar Coen veterans, and it is this that really makes this movie work. Michael Badalucco puts in a hilarious turn as Thornton's gabby brother-in-law, Frances McDormand is effective in her relatively few scenes as his brittle wife, and James Gandolfini plays yet another boorish tough guy to a turn. Practically shoplifting the movie is Tony Shalhoub, playing a fast-talking Sacramento lawyer who doesn't so much speak as summate. His discussion of Heisenberg is almost worth the ticket price alone. Christopher Kriesa and Brian Haley get a lot of mileage out of their brief appearances as a pair of slightly dim cops (aren't they all in these movies?)

Joel Coen, who directed, makes sure that the movie is consistently interesting to watch, too. Black and white photography being mostly about shades of gray, noir is perhaps the only genre that benefits from the relative primitiveness of its visual technology. Coen, therefore, sticks with it, unlike the colors he used in the '30s themed "O Brother Where Art Thou?" which managed to be both more fanciful and less surreal than this movie. He uses the light-and-shadow character of black and white to great effect here, carefully crafting his images to make best use of it. In fact, if the movie has a fault, it's that the images are a little TOO carefully crafted. The purest noir was cleverly filmed, but it allowed its cleverness to seep into the background. You have to watch a few times to pick up on how sharp the filmmaking is. Coen is unable to hide his arty cleverness, and so in the end, fun as it is to watch, the movie is a bit too pretty to truly capture the essence of its forbears. Perhaps realizing this, the Coens tweak the conventions mercilessly, and inject a streak of humor that is funnier for being played so straight (there are lots of funny lines, but don't be surprised if you are the only one in the theater laughing. Actually, don't be surprised if you are the only one in the theater, period.) The movie does require a bit of patience; the pacing is intense but quite slow, and the story wanders like a drunk driver. In the end, it is somewhat debatable whether the twisty plot is fully resolved, or whether that even matters. "The Man That Wasn't There" is best viewed as a wicked cinematic joke, and in that regard, it succeeds, in (Sam) spades.

But what do I know? I'm just some sap.

I'm sorry, but I like my black and white black and white - ESPECIALLY in a film that sets out to be the most pure film noir of all. The shadows should be, simply, black, not black tinted with dark green. The greys should be, simply, grey, not pearl grey or slate grey or any of the other shades of paint-catalogue grey that are the result (I presume) of trying to make a black and white film without using any actual black and white film. I don't know the precise technological explanation; I do know that the film would be at least twice as good if the Coens would simply take the master print and transfer it to whatever material they use when they screen, say, "Double Indemnity". This is not hyperbole.

Not that it's not good already. Joel Coen, who in "O Brother, Where Art Thou" showed himself to be one of the few living directors capable of fully exploiting colour, shows himself here to be one of the few living directors capable of fully exploiting light and shade. I particularly liked the scene where the defence lawyer explains why if we look at something too closely, we fail to see it, while his face (and only his face) is bathed in JUST enough too much light to prevent us from seeing it properly. It sounds academic, but it works: the Coens never use an idea if they can't make it breathe.

As a rule, first-person narration breathes life into books but kills films - with the exception of one genre: film noir. And the Coens understand why it works, when it does, in this rare exception. Like most noir protagonists, Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton) is almost perfectly uncommunicative: neither his conversation nor his actions tell us anything about him. We need direct access to his very thoughts, put into words, to be able to understand what's going on and to appreciate his story. And it's only fitting that we're allowed to listen to him as HE takes stock of his own story, for the very first time, now that it's all over. -And maybe the Coens don't even need this justification. Ethan has written what may be the most delicious, perceptive and apt first-person voice-over the genre has seen.

"The Man Who Wasn't There" is not as magnificent an achievement as "Barton Fink" or "O Brother, Where Art Thou" - but then, no noir film is. (It's really a constricting genre; Billy Wilder's finest works aren't noir, either.) The fact that there are so many good noir films should be regarded as a miracle. Here is another miracle.

It starts as another Coenian postmod pastichey picaresque: Noir Guy (Billy Bob Thornton), a barber, has a souse of a wife (Frances McDormand, floridly cast "against type") who loves bingo and her boss at work, a scheming fat man named Big Dave (James Gandolfini). When a comically inept con man (Jon Polito) comes to town, wanting to find a partner in a new business called "dry cleaning," we can see the signs a block away: Blackmail, best-laid-plans, murder ahead. The emphasis in this extremely academic take--more academic even than the Ph.Dish MILLER'S CROSSING--is on the sociological and political roots of noir. The postwarness, the cold-warness, the sunshine-boomtownness of the movie's mythical Santa Rosa (the location of SHADOW OF A DOUBT--but really, it's just early-Ellroy L.A.) are all underlined and double-underlined.

So far, so cool--and the movie is far easier to enjoy as a series of Abstracted Noir Components than the similarly suspension-of-disbelief-free LOST HIGHWAY. But then Noir Guy starts contemplating hair. He is the Sisyphus of Noirtown, performing a perfectly stupid task that never ceases to repeat itself, without gathering the slightest meaning. He even, in his blank way, waxes philosophical, like a Marine-town Woyzeck: "I want...I wanna put hair with...dirt, regular house dirt." "Ed, what the heck are ya talkin' about?" "I...Skip it."

And soon the movie metamorphs into a fedoras-and-Pall-Malls riff on Camus' THE STRANGER. Why does the Man Who Wasn't There kick off the chain of events that brings down all manner of ruination? Jealousy? Boredom? No ordinary human motives will do. And the Coens slyly insert a shyster lawyer (Tony Shalhoub) who's full of dime-store variants on post-structuralist touchstones: he uses the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle as a sort of Twinkie Defense, and claims that his client is "Modern Man himself!...Indict him, and you are indicting yourself!" All of which, the Coens make clear, is so much malarkey--a way of kidding oneself, substituting entropy for dogma, avoiding the scary unknowableness of being alive.

Ethan Coen described THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE as "the movie Martin Heidegger would have made if he had come to Hollywood"--unusually forthright for two guys who are just, aw shucks, entertainers. Like Spielberg's A.I., it uses a perfectedness of technique to render the world as an arrangement of totemic abstractions--pixilated dots that don't add up to a coherent object. The movie gets you, terrifyingly and melancholically, inside the head of a guy for whom the simplest, table-and-chairs stuff is ceasing to make sense. And the brothers use Carter Burwell's variant on Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" in a way that's as crazily persistent, and ceaselessly effective, as the insanely repetitive romantic theme from Godard's CONTEMPT. (Not even Godard has used late Beethoven so aptly.) Like BARRY LYNDON, another movie whose central question is "What kind of a man are you?," THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE has an elusive, smokelike plangency. It's a picture you'll puzzle over, and sigh achingly at its images, for many years to come.