The Man Who Wasn’t There (no 40)

by Allan Fish

(USA 2001 112m) DVD1/2

He just cuts the hair

p  Ethan Coen  d  Joel Coen  w  Ethan Coen, Joel Coen  ph  Roger Deakins  ed  Roderick Jaynes  m  Carter Burwell (and Ludwig Van Beethoven)  art  Dennis Gassner  cos  Mary Zophres

Billy Bob Thornton (Ed Crane), Frances McDormand (Doris Crane), James Gandolfini (Big Dave Brewster), Michael Badalucco (Frank), Richard Jenkins (Walter Abundas), Scarlett Johansson (Birdie Abundas), Jon Polito (Creighton Tolliver), Tony Shalhoub (Freddy Riedenschneider), Katharine Horowitz (Ann Brewster), Christopher MacDonald (Macadam salesman), Jennifer Jason Leigh (inmate),

It’s seen as a film noir homage and reworking of the world of James Cain, of shady characters, rough justice poetically dispatched by fates seemingly laughing at what Rick Blaine said the hills of beans the problems of a few little people add up to.  In some ways they would be right, it does owe something to The Postman Always Rings Twice, but it owes aspects to many other sources.  In actuality what we really have here is an art film, and a spellbinding one which dares to have as its protagonist a virtual blank, a non-entity who by his own words is just a barber. 

            Meet Ed Crane, second barber at a small family barber’s shop in 1949 California – Santa Rosa to be precise – who becomes increasingly aware that his wife Doris is having an affair with her boss, Dave Brewster.  At first he doesn’t really seem to care until one day one of his customers, one Creighton Tolliver, tells him of a business proposition surrounding the then burgeoning possibilities in dry cleaning.  Ed needs $10,000 to become silent partner in the enterprise, and so hits on the scheme to anonymously blackmail Dave into getting the money.  He gets the money only for Dave to find out about the nefarious scheme and confront Ed.  There’s a big fight and, pretty much in self-defence, Ed kills Dave.  To his surprise, it’s his wife who’s fingered for the murder as she’d been cooking the books of the store – at Dave’s behest, but the police doesn’t know that. 

            And believe it or not we’re only about half way through the film.  After their earlier homages (Miller’s Crossing, The Big Lebowski) we now expect the plot to go off in a strange direction around two thirds of the way in, and the Coens don’t disappoint with a subplot involving possible alien abduction and Ed’s rising obsession with the teenage daughter of his friend.  That sudden take off into unexpected realms may not sit well with many who watch the film, but in truth the bigger stumbling block is the passivity of the chain-smoking Ed.  He literally is like a phantom; late in the film he remarks that “it was like I was a ghost wandering down the street”, but we’d figured that out a long time before.  It’s a leisurely film, a sedate film which moves along at its own pace, like a tumbleweed drifting down the main street, only accompanied by the haunting strains of Beethoven’s ‘Pathétique’ and ‘Moonlight’ sonatas.  Oh, and an introductory burst of Mozart’s familiar ‘Sull Aria’, drifting over the eponymous prison in The Shawshank Redemption, and here not by chance as Ed’s narration comes from what we later find out is his cell on death row.

            Thornton may dominate with sublime understated skill but the performances are all pitch perfect, from McDormand’s wife to Gandolfini’s irrepressible fraud, from Shalhoub’s city-slicker lawyer to Polito’s folically challenged gay salesman, and from Johansson’s level-headed piano playing teenager to Badalucco’s eternally fat-chewing barber.  The script is structured to perfection, the designs and music integrating as seamlessly as Gassner and Burwell’s earlier work for the Coens, while Deakins’ crisp black and white photography is sublime.  There are the usual Coen motifs in there – not least the bouncing hubcap – but it’s in the ending that we’re given perhaps the biggest homage and to a film far from the world of California and film noir; it’s set in 1949, is narrated by someone about to be executed for a murder he didn’t commit having got away with one he did.  Sound familiar?  No last minute pardon here, though.