Coens' Misstep

The Coen Brothers may be the strongest writing/directing team of the last twenty years, but even Michael Jordan missed 26 potential game winning shots (p.s. fact). Though I suppose the comparisons don't have to stop there as Jordan saw fit to punish humanity with his own dabbling in Hollywood. And while the worst of the Coen Brothers isn't as damning as SPACE JAM, its always frustrating when cultural icons prove themselves mortal. In an absurd attempt to give THE HUDSUCKER PROXY competition for loudest sigh response, the Coen Brothers flung a movie at audiences in 2001 called THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE.

Ed, a quietly disgruntled and emotionally isolated barber played by Billy Bob Thorton, hatches a scheme to secretly blackmail his best friend and invest the money in a dry-cleaning start up company. For whatever reason people start dying an unusually heavy-handed, emotionally blunted and dull witted zaniness ensues. First off, it's always bothered me that Billy Bob Thorton's name is Billy Bob--which I connotate to being the first, (not) funny, phony name mouth-breathers articulate. But Billy Bob isn't even given the chance to passively stumble through any typically Katana-sharp Coen quips, idioms or tangents. The story, acting and writing are slowed to a unsympathetic trudge.

Set in 1940s California, the characters (led by Ed) collectively sigh for two hours about their dreary suburban lives and the paper-thin similarities to federal prison. The setting and writing ring false at best and mundane at worst. Protagonists being bored by their safe, well-to-do surroundings is nothing new in the world of cinema, but setting this tone in that brief period between WWII and the suburban housing boom is new. And it's new because it's more than a stretch to believe people are bored by their lives less than two years after America opened up a can of Harry S. Truman on the world. But the larger problem isn't historical accuracy, but rather why set the movie in 1940s California. The story certainly isn't setting sensitive. The Coen Brothers' knack for spatial and temporal dialects is unrivaled so it's justified to be thrown by this movie's lack of verbal style. At no point does the dialogue hit a nerve of understated irony or all-too familiar, yet undocumented, nuances that made the best Coen movies so damned enjoyable.

For the first 3/4 of the film, Joel and Ethan Coen spin a basic cause-and-effect narrative more than competently. Then they seem to get bored themselves jarringly jump to flashbacks, then the future and then to a five minute scene from months before the first scene then back to what I have to assume is the present and then more years into the future and then back to present. Eventually the movie ends, but not before Ed makes a voiced-over, mono-toned admission that he (and through him, the Coens) padded the length of this here story for a couple extra bucks. While frustrated by the slow-winded "joke," I almost felt better than when I thought I had sat on the remote control and pressed the "slow" button at some point because a 116 minute movie should not kill my entire afternoon.

And while I'm sure someone somewhere could dig up an example BB Thorton being saved by a more talented supporting cast, this movie won't be it. James Gandolfini is type-casted into a adversary reminiscent of the Tony Soprano role he was practically poured into. Perhaps his large frame and high pitched voice is the cause, but the man can not shake away from being a powerful man-child. He's big but he's got the emotional maturity of a neglected 10-year old (hell, he just did it again in WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE). Falling in line, Scarlet Johansson plays an airy, underage idol to a time that's long since passed Thorton. Aside from not moving the film's plot one inch, her character reinforces the fear that men can fall in love with silk-skinned robots--which isn't actually bending that much subtext (at one point, a piano instructor accuses her of not having a heart).

However other elements of the movie are more black and white. In fact, the movie, itself has less photo color than SCHINDLER'S LIST--and less racial color than LORD OF THE RINGS, for that matter. The film noir style, galvanizing any film nerd, jumps back and forth between inconsistent and inaccurate (what noir film has a family reunion?). I never pinned down if the film was meant as a throw-back to the 1940s, send-up of a genre dead since 1959 or a short-lived, half-assed attempt to further a neo-noir style.

I'm a fan of the Coen Brothers; just see: FARGO, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, MILLER'S CROSSING, THE BIG LEBOWSKI, etc. But when I see such a emotional and thematic slip as seen in THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE, it dampens my enthusiasm to see what appears to be a similar movie (A SERIOUS MAN) by the brothers set 20 years later and a frontier away. Any more, movies cost $8 to see. Though I found $4 in my pocket earlier today. So maybe I should see it. I don't know, fuck it; I'll just watch SPACE JAM because I hate myself.