The Man Who Wasn't There (2001)
Directed by Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

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.

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...