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By John Demetry
Before, they blew up the American Dream to appropriately mammoth comic proportions - sheer time-hopping size and wonderment in Hudsucker, Busby-Berkley-style kaleidoscope of characters and genres in Lebowski. Now, they expand the minutiae of American living to unanticipated tragic-comic dimensions. In their most highly acclaimed film, the shallow Fargo, they got the details down, but not the necessary spiritual perspective. That's what now distinguishes The Man Who Wasn't There. A barber, played by Billy Bob Thornton, shares his reverie on cutting hair in the voice-over narration that tells the film's story. "It just keeps growing. It's part of us. And we just throw it away." That's funny in a store-front philosopher way - in a distinctly down-home American way. The context changes - deepens - when the Coens' camera pans across the hairdos of the barbers' clienteles, the jury, and the witnesses at an execution. The Coens repeat shots of a razor shaving a leg, then shedding the small hairs into water. Their jokes resonate. The wit has razor incisiveness. The black-and-white visuals in The Man Who Wasn't There constitute an American conundrum, an American version of Shakespeare's "To be or not to be?" It has to be funny to be this real and this beautiful. The Coens seriously wonder about American life: "What have we thrown away?" It's as if the Coens realize something about their cool obsession, best expressed as witty intellectualism, with American pop culture - especially film and roman noir. They recognize it as an emotional catalogue.
Only hipster cynicism will act as recourse for the audience to not be "there" with them and with the barber. The Coens do everything they can to cut through that cynicism. They provide an original way of looking at America and its people. The effect should be as powerful as the post-modern revelation of New York's altered skyline. Nothing ever was the same. That's the American mystery the Coens investigate in The Man Who Wasn't There. The audience knows who kills whom, who blackmails whom, who sleeps with whom, and how the whole tangled web of adultery, blackmail, and murder gets spun. The Brothers improve on the gorgeous but smart-ass mechanics of their "Miller's Crossing". The Coens discover a human mystery in cinematographer Roger Deakins' shadows. Light reveals clues: as in the framing of Thornton silhouetted in the foreground smoking with the bathroom-lit background displaying a bathtub, out of which pokes the legs of his wife (maybe Frances McDormand's most trenchant characterization). A hubcap spins off of a crashed car and turns into a UFO. That provides the visual transition - and the imaginative breadth - to a flashback that holds the glass key to the film's deep-rooted mystery. The audience knows what has happened, but now begins to understand why. It's a daring narrative trick, like the ending's revealing the source for Thornton's narration, for which post-Tarantino film spectators may not be prepared. The Coens trust - hope! - that the interest in American pop culture that Tarantino tapped into - however insidiously - suggests an undernourished interest in American spiritual life. Although set in a post-World War II American small town filtered through film noir, this pop historical reference point establishes The Man Who Wasn't There as an attempt to encourage a needed imaginative understanding of America's - and even the world's - modern spiritual turmoil.
The Coens get at Americans' fascination with crime and pulp as a form of cathartic rebellion. But they offer an alternative - the revelation of art. Surely, one might read Thornton's barber as a misplaced artist, but Thornton's characterization is more honest. His unflappable angst matches that of a post-modern audience - unmoved and unmoving. His attempt to express his story, his simple wish of Heaven, and his adoration of a teenage girl who plays Beethoven on the piano mark his desperate search for an expression and a clarification of his life. He discovers that even America's mighty courts make a mockery of such searches for truth - much less justice. That's the American way the Coens hope to correct. They give the beleaguered audience its best hope for salvation. Through a new respect - call it love - for their audience, they end up giving the American Dream its due. The meeting of pop and art in The Man Who Wasn't There is a profoundly democratic vision. The man who wasn't there is finally there - on America's movie screens. |
Billy Bob Thornton and James Gandolfini in the Coen Brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There
Billy Bob Thornton and Jon Polito 
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