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THE
MAN WHO WASN’T THERE
5/10
USA
2001
director
: Joel Coen
script : Joel & Ethan Coen
producers include : Ethan Coen
cinematography : Roger Deakins
editing : “Roderick Jaynes” (i.e. Joel & Ethan Coen), Tricia Cooke
music : Carter Burwell
lead actors : Billy Bob Thornton, Frances McDormand, James Gandolfini,
Tony Shalhoub
also : Scarlett Johansson, Michael Badalucco, John Polito, Adam Alexi-Malle
115 minutes
American,
the early fifties: taciturn small-town barber Ed Crane (Thornton) suspects
his wife (McDormand) of having an affair with her boss (Gandolfini). This
proves to be only the start of his troubles… From every technical angle,
the Coens’ version of film noir is flawless: impeccably lit, costumed,
cast, acted and, above all, shot - Roger Deakins’ sensational black-and-white
cinematography is easily worth the price of admission on its own, and
bears comparison with noir’s original shadow-master, John Alton.
But,
as so often in the past, the brilliance of the Coens’ collaborators can’t
compensate for the brothers’ own shortcomings in the script department.
It’s as if they sat down with some period newspapers, cut out some stories
and adverts and cobbled them together into something they hoped would
pass for a coherent narrative. The absurdities pile up right from the
off: the thing that sparks Ed’s decline is his need for cash to buy into
a hare-brained dry-cleaning scam: his wife’s infidelity is, at best, secondary.
Theirs is a loveless, sexless union - so loveless, in fact, one suspects
Ed is going to bump her off, rather than suddenly undergo a transformation,
half-way through, into a noble, self-sacrificing husband. And no matter
how pin-sharp Deakins’ images, Mrs Crane never really comes into focus
– how many of the film’s many vocal admirers can even recall her first
name? Could it be Marion?
Ed’s
abrupt changes of character are, of course, just mechanisms by which the
Coens can bring in fast-talking larger-than-life characters played by
Polito and Shalhoub. The Coens clearly love writing this pair’s rat-a-tat
patter – words which rely on style, not content, to convey impressions.
Because this is, of course, their own cinematic language – they acknowledge
as much when they including a scene where a piano teacher criticises a
pupil (Ghost World’s
terrific, versatile Johansson) for being all technique and no meaning,
no heart. It’s an unconvincing, too-late attempt at a smart-ass get-out:
The Man Who Wasn’t There has by then degenerated into a series
of arbitrary convolutions that make less and less little sense.
Near
the end, there’s an especially desperate detour into incongruous crassness
involving Thornton, Johansson and a bit of in-car fellatio that emphasises
just how far the Coens have fallen since their gloriously controlled,
modulated 1984 debut Blood Simple. That movie, despite being made
in pulsating colour, subtly captured the exact spirit of its sources,
the very noirish worlds of writers James M Cain and Jim Thompson. It must
have been a glorious fluke: The Man Who Wasn’t There suggests the
Coens saw five minutes of some forties thriller on TV one night and thought
it might be a lark to knock out one of their own. Of noir’s style, it’s
a great pastiche. Of its substance, a great travesty.
7th
January, 2002
(seen
Oct-17-01, Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle)
by Neil
Young
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