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Rating:
Among the many characters that crowd the Coen brothers' filmography, one stands out above the rest for his clear yet bitter understanding of life and its mechanisms. He is not a double-dealing gangster, a pregnant but dynamic police officer, nor an old sheriff almost ready for retirement (though they come close), but a simple Californian barber, Ed Crane.
"There they were, all busy with their lives. It was as if I knew a secret larger than the truth about Big Dave, something none of them knew. As if I had stepped outside while they were floundering in the dark depths"
Ed is a bundle of contradictions: to people he is "just" a barber (even worse, an assistant barber), often not remembered by name, and his almost zero loquacity doesn’t help him stand out, making him an invisible being. But inside, Ed Crane is very reflective and perceptive, feeling almost trapped within the walls of the shop and his home, where he lives with his wife Doris; she cheats on him with the director of the store where she works, Big Dave, but Ed doesn’t seem to make a drama out of it.
The big opportunity to change his life seems to appear before him in the quirky form of a "viola mammola" with a toupee, Creighton Tolliver, who proposes setting up a dry-cleaning company; to get the necessary capital, Ed immediately thinks of anonymously blackmailing Big Dave. From there, everything spirals downward: the "viola mammola" seems to vanish, Big Dave is found dead, killed by Ed himself, and Doris is accused of the murder. To try to save her, he gets into massive debt with the bank to secure the best lawyer, Freddy Riedenschneider. The "show" promised by Riedenschneider won’t happen because Doris decides to take her own life before the trial begins.
With guilt overwhelming him for having been the cause of it all, Ed tries to do a good deed by becoming a manager/mentor to a teenage pianist, Birdy. However, the audition doesn’t go well, and on the return trip, he ends up in a car accident. Upon waking up, he finds himself arrested for a murder he didn’t commit, that of Tolliver, and not even Riedenschneider can save him from a bitter fate, which Ed accepts willingly, in the same way he has lived his entire life.
"Life dealt me losing hands, or maybe I didn’t know how to play them, who knows... Now I wanted to talk, but I had no one beside me: I was a ghost, I saw no one, and no one saw me. I was the barber..."
The Coens return with this work to their first love, noir, and to one of their most used devices, blackmail. What differentiates The Man Who Wasn’t There from other films is the increased maturity with which the themes are tackled, starting with the ruthless and cynical reflection on the human condition that results from it.
At the base, we still have pessimism; no one can change their condition, escape the apathy of everyday life, and if someone, like Ed, tries, they will be inevitably led to ruin, appearing thus as a total loser. Alongside the pessimism is chaos; both Ed and Doris pay for actions they didn’t commit, hardly even knowing what led them to that situation, only the result of a series of coincidences impossible to foresee. The only principle that seems to perfectly describe society, human beings, and their actions is Heisenberg’s principle (wisely quoted in the film), a mathematical definition of total uncertainty. The great tragedy turns into a great farce in the final trial, a mirror of justice just as random in finding its victims.
Everyone has found a place, adapted their personality to society’s needs, while Ed remains a complex character, deep inside but unable to express himself outwardly, so much so that when his true self tries to surface, everything shatters, and he lets it go; only when he’s lost everything does he seem to find a role, a reason to exist.
"Then it was Riedenschneider’s turn, he said I had lost my place in the world, that I was too mediocre to possess that criminal mentality the prosecution attributed to me, he said I was like them, a man of our times. He said not to look at the facts, but the meaning of the facts, then he said those facts had no meaning. He made a great speech, I even believed him"
Ed is meticulously described through his long monologues, but also through Billy Bob Thornton’s extraordinary acting, painful and practically expressionless throughout the film, constantly surrounded by a haze of cigarette smoke. But even the other actors don’t pale in comparison to his performance, from the loyal Frances Mc Dormand (Doris) to Jon Polito (Tolliver, his last appearance in a Coen film), to small screen stars James Gandolfini (Big Dave) and Tony Shalhoub (Riedenschneider, returning 10 years exactly after Barton Fink), and to future star Scarlett Johansson (Birdy).
Elevating it all is the splendid black and white, with a perfectly selected choice of lighting, the soundtrack consisting of profoundly melancholic classical piano compositions, worthy background for Ed Crane’s soliloquies and the same slow pace, which serves to allow the audience to think and accentuate participation in the film itself. The typical black humor in the various references to alien encounters or in the figure of the French piano teacher is also not lacking.
A "true" story because it fully reflects human behavior and is one of the artistic and poetic pinnacles of the two brothers.
"I don’t know where they will take me next, I don’t know what I will find beyond the sky and earth, but I am not afraid to leave. Maybe the things I don’t understand here will be clearer there, like when the fog clears. Maybe Doris will be there and maybe there I will be able to say all those things that here have no words."
SCORE = 8.5
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