Film Review
A corollary of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is that it is
impossible to observe something without in some way influencing what we
observe. This would seem to deny the possibility of an objective
reality, as the very act of looking at something will invariaby change
the very thing we are trying to observe. Putting it another way, the more
we look at something, the less we see - a nice paradox, but one that is
apparently refuted by
The Man Who
Wasn't There, the most stylish and profound of the Coen
brothers' films to date. Heisenberg's famous principle crops up
in a memorable trial scene in the film, where a smart lawyer invokes it
in an attempt to acquit his client of the charge of murder. It's
a pretty underhand ploy - confuse the jury by convincing them it is
impossible to know anything with any certainty - but it underlies what
the film is essentially about - coping with the illusion of reality.
Whilst there are some who will attempt to argue otherwise, cinema is
inherently a subjective art form. Classic American film noir of
the 1940s and 50s is, arguably, cinema at its most subjective. A
development of German expressionism, it is a style of filmmaking which
boldly reflects the anxieties of the main protagonists in the world
they inhabit, a world rendered dark and sinister by high contrast black
and white photography and confined, shadowy sets. This is the
style that the Coens adopted for
The Man
Who Wasn't There, a dazzling pastiche of film noir that
transcends its trashy pulp fiction storyline and delivers a powerfully
moving study in identity.
Fans of the Coens will know that this is not their first flirtation
with film noir; their early films are visibly influenced by the
aesthetic, most notably their memorable first offering
Blood Simple (1984). Their
latest foray into film noir territory is, however, a far more involving
and inspired affair, one which exploits the conventions of noir to
weave a deeply personal examination of the meaning and value of human
existence.
The Man Who Wasn't
There is a film that can be enjoyed as a retro-B movie
thriller-melodrama, but you don't have to look too closely to see that
there is far more to it than this. In its sombre meditation on
existentialist themes, it tries to convince us that, amid the chaos and confusion of our lives,
there is a kind of order to it, if only we made the effort to look for
it.
In the era in which the film is set (the late 1940s), traditional
religious belief systems were in decline and it is no
coincidence that around this time there began a craze for U.F.O.
sightings. Belief in the existence of intelligent alien lifeforms
had begun to supplant man's belief in God - after WWII, it was
perhaps easier to believe in little green
men from Mars than in an all-seeing, all-powerful deity who could sit
by and let his ultimate creation casually commit genocide. The
Coens allude to this passing fad for extra-terrestials in their film,
partly in a tongue-in-cheel vein, but also to underscore the spiritual
vacuity of the protagonists and the modern era into which they are
moving.
The wife of the murder victim is convinced that her husband was done in
by aliens (she cites as evidence the fact that he ceased having
conjugal relations with her after she saw him entering their spaceship
one day). Towards the end of the film, the main protagonist has a
close encounter of his own kind (although this probably takes place in
a dream). It is tempting to interpret this as an attempt to
dismiss all belief systems as baloney, but perhaps what the Coens are
really getting at is that a man can only make sense of his life if he
looks at it through his own eyes, not through the muddled thinking of
philosphers and fanatics who exist merely to promote their own wild
delusions. Truth is not what you are told, but what you discover
for yourself.
The Man Who Wasn't There may
be slow moving, cliché-sodden and sometimes a little too
far-fetched to take seriously (the plot is an unashamed rip-off of
James M. Cain's
The Postman Always
Rings Twice), but none of this prevents it from exerting a
hypnotic hold on the spectator. Two things make this a
particularly compelling piece of cinema: Roger Deakins' gorgeous
noir-like photography (which is so true to the spirit of classic film
noir that you could almost swear the film was made in the 1940s) and
Billy Bob Thornton's mesmeric central performance as the ill-fated
barber Ed Crane. In classic noir fashion, the thoughts and
feelings of the main protagonist are conveyed to us through his
internal monologue, in the blunt staccato prose beloved of 1940s pulp
fiction crime writers. On screen, Thornton's Ed Crane is a
strangely distant character, and yet through his monologue we get to
know him intimately and his slow descent into Hell (through the
unlikeliest of B-movie plot twists) cannot fail to leave us
unmoved. Ed's is a painful journey of self-discovery, but even
though his story ends tragically, we can some take comfort from the
fact that he ultimately manages to work out who he us. Just
before his time runs out, the pattern of his life becomes apparent to
him - and that is as much as any of us could hope for.
© James Travers 2012
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Film Synopsis
In 1949, Ed Crane works as a barber in a small American town, in a shop
belonging to his brother-in-law. He is married to Doris, a
bookkeeper at a department store owned by Big Dave Brewster. Ed
knows that Doris is having an affair with her employer but he is
untroubled by this. The spark has long since gone out of his
marriage and he dreams about making a fresh start. So when a
stranger named Creighton Tolliver offers to make him a partner in his
new dry cleaning business, he jumps at the chance. All Ed has to
do is put up 10,000 dollars, which he gets by blackmailing Big
Dave. It isn't long after he has handed over the money that Ed
realises he has been duped, but he is taken by surprise when Big Dave
summons him to his store one evening and identifies him as the
blackmailer. When Big Dave attacks him, Ed defends himself with a
knife but ends up stabbing his aggressor to death. By a bizarre
turn of events, it is Ed's wife who is arrested for the killing...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.