Personal Rant:

All of you bitter scrunched nose, bent brow, saggy-frowned, sniveling, smirking, sneering post-modern pseudo-intellects with scholarly allusions bulging in your pants loved this movie. I know you did. I can hear you chattering about it at your wine tastings, and your smoking lounges, and your luxuriously evil mountain hideaways (yes, I know about your hideaways). You sit there and moan about how futile and pointless existence is and how you don’t know how you’ll ever live through the next second, let alone the next day, because living is such a burden, no one understands anybody, and nobody’s worth trying to understand anyway because, except for you and a few others “in the know,” humanity is a clutter of moron folk who stumble through life in blissful ignorance. You sip your wine and cry about the dull procession of fools and wonder why you, of the billions of people that have walked the earth, were born with the rare ability to see reality as it really is. You impudent children.

How dare you? How dare you discount life? Billions of people are struggling to survive, and you smugly sit back and wallow in self pity. Billions are starving, fighting for the food and shelter and freedom you so coolly take for granted. The masses you mock have literally worked to make the suit you’re wearing, the car you drive, the food you eat, the bed you sleep in. And you criticize them because they didn’t have the opportunity to go to college and suckle the silver teat like you? Complacent donkey-tails! Have you, in all your reading of Camus and Kafka and Beckett, ever stopped to consider your cynicism? Have you ever paused and looked in the mirror to see what a baked lump of coal you’ve become? Get up, you’re of no use to the world this way.

That’s how I felt walking out of the Coen brothers’ latest film The Man Who Wasn’t There. The bitterness is so repugnant, and so intellectually stale, that I wondered why this film was ever produced.

The Plot (Note: this section is long and gives away major details)

The film opens with a barber pole (the pole of endless futility) that swirls in black and white. We meet the protagonist, Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thronton), the barber who has it all. Ed cuts hair in a traditional 1940s barbershop with his partner, Frank, and lives in a modest home with his wife, Doris (Frances McDormand), who works at the department store, Nurdlinger’s. Ed is a quiet man. He listens to Frank jabber endlessly to customers while he says nothing. At home, his wife has dinner parties with business associates, and he listens to them jabber endlessly while he says nothing.

One night, Doris’s boss, “Big Dave” (James Gandolfini), and his wife come over for dinner and Ed listens to Big Dave rave about furniture, or something as trivial as furniture. The banter is inane, yet Ed watches his wife break out in laughing fits at everything Big Dave says. From their intimacy, Ed believes Doris and Big Dave are having an affair.

Cut to the barbershop. A businessman comes in at the end of the day, looking for a haircut. The shop is closing, but Ed volunteers to give the man a cut. Bad move, Ed. The man is Creighton Tolliver (Joe Polito), a short spunky businessman that looks like he’s got a hundred deals up his sleeves. As it turns out, he does have a proposition for Ed—dry-cleaning. Tolliver plans to franchise the new dry-cleaning phenomenon across the United States, and all he needs is a partner to get things ironed out.

That night, Ed visits Tolliver at his hotel and offers to be his partner. Ed already has everything he could want, but greed, and a sense that he has nothing better to do, urge him on. Tolliver begins drooling over Ed (he even makes a pass at him), and says the business needs $10,000, is he sure he can get that kind of money? “I’ll get it,” says Ed, and the audience wonders how.

Blackmail. Ed decides to play with Big Dave. He types a letter, saying he knows about Dave’s affair with Doris, and that he’ll squeal if Dave doesn’t give him $10,000. Clever, Ed. A few days later, Big Dave invites Ed to Nurdlinger’s at night. Ed goes alone. He meets Big Dave in his Big Office and soon realizes that Dave has discovered who’s behind the blackmail. Dave grabs Ed, throws him against the glass wall of his office, and begins choking him. Ed is dying, his sad eyes bulging at Dave. It seems Ed is just about to pass out when his arm jumps out like a snake and stabs Big Dave in the neck with a cigar knife. Blood spurts out of the neck, and Big Dave falls away, choking on his blood, and convulsing on the ground like a shot pig. I paid to see this.

The next morning, police come to the barbershop, and Ed is ready to go to jail. Instead, the policemen tell Ed that his wife has been arrested for murder. Ed doesn’t bother telling the police they got the wrong man. Instead he walks calmly to the town lawyer, Walter Abundas, to seek counsel for Doris. Walter, an incompetent dope, decides the lawyer Freddie Riedenschneider, of Sacramento, is Doris’s only hope. In the background, Walter’s daughter Birdy plays the 2nd movement of Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata, a slow, lugubrious melody. In itself, Beethoven’s sonata is beautiful. In the movie, the Coens repeat the music over and over, conditioning the audience to relive the film’s disgusting tragedy every time the sonata plays, for the rest of our lives.

Freddy Riedenschneider (Tony Shaloub), the big city lawyer, comes in like a white Johnny Cochran and meets with Ed and Doris to develop a dazzling defense. Riedenschneider looks everywhere but the truth to figure out how to free Doris. He finally rests on an argument involving the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, which says that you cannot look at an object without changing it. Therefore, Riedenschneider argues, the more you try to figure something out, the less you know about it, and therefore Doris must be acquitted. To the film’s credit, this satire on lawyers works.

It seems like Riedenschneider’s defense will work too, until Doris, saddened by the death of Big Dave, hangs herself in jail. Isn’t this a delightful surprise?

Ed carries on at the barbershop, taking more and more interest in the busty teenage piano player, Birdy Abundas. I call this the American Beauty segment of the film. Ed comes to the Abundas house and listens to Birdy play the Appassionata. He goes to the high school talent show to hear Birdy’s performance. Ed is so impressed by Birdy’s extraordinarily perky…hands, that he dreams of managing her piano career. He starts by taking Birdy to an exclusive piano teacher in Sacramento. On the way back, as they drive in the country together, Birdy decides this might be the appropriate time to give Ed what he’s really after. She leans over into Ed’s pants, Ed looks down, and the car flies off the road and crashes, presumably killing Birdy and Ed. Lovely.

At one point in the movie, Ed pauses in the barber shop to reflect. “All the hair,” he says to Frank, “the hair keeps growing back. We keep cutting it, and it keeps coming back.” And, amidst all the pain in the film, you can guess Ed’s probably thinking about all of humanity here, how we keep trying to heap order onto a crooked universe, and how pathetic and absurd and futile the effort is. Yuck. The movie, like the hair, keeps coming. It doesn’t end with the car crash, but continues to barf misery on the world.

Ed wakes up in a hospital to find that he and Birdy didn’t die, but that he’s being charged with the murder of Creighton Tolliver, ironically the murder he didn’t commit. There’s a trial, and Ed brings back Freddy Riedenschneider to charm the mindless jurors with his special Heisenberg defense. All is going well until Ed’s partner Frank cracks and starts beating Ed in the courtroom. A mistrial is declared, and Ed is out of money. He’s forced to stand trial again without the snappy wit of Riedenschneider, and Ed is convicted. He finally gets to die. What a relief for him.

There’s Ed in his lonely cell. There’s Ed walking down the hall, into the snow white killing room. There’s the electric chair, the simple device that will take Ed from here to eternity. Good-bye, Ed.


Concluding Rant:

Well, Ethan and Joel Coen, you have collected your waste and successfully smeared it onto film. Good for you. It’s just sad that producers will invest in it, that actors will act in it, and that people will pay to experience your black tantrum.

“You just don’t get it,” the cynics tell me, “It’s so true and funny. It’s funny and sad because it’s true.” Wake up, cynics. You’ve been seduced by the power of negativity. I do not deny the power, I merely recognize that life is more than a spiraling black-and-white barber pole, so much more, if you only look.

With the horrors of wars in the 20th century, and signs in the 21st century that the tragedy keep coming, it is your duty to fight negativity, not succumb to it, as the Coens do. Don’t bask in the luxury of cynicism. If you do, I’ll throw a book of a truly great person like Helen Keller, Ghandi, Einstein, or Conrad Aiken at you, and you’ll see the noble response to the world’s apparent chaos. And don’t tell me these people “don’t understand,” because they’ve all known deep tragedy but have risen above it and found meaning and contributed constructively to the world.

And you dare commiserate with The Man Who Wasn’t There, a film that was created to destroy, a film that does nothing but force the audience into its lake of despair and holds heads face down in the water until you can’t help but get a bit of its dirty ink up your nose? You commiserate with this? A backhand to your cheek!

Some classify The Man Who Wasn’t There as film noir. While there are elements of noir, I think the movie deserves another genre—it is film meird, and it should be flushed straight down the toilet, back to the sewage-soaked minds that made it.


Recommended:
No

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age