I must confess that while I enjoy the Coen brothers’ movies (who wouldn’t?), I can’t find in them the genius most seem to spot.
Well this totally changed with this movie. Unlike our favourite Monkey, the more the film progressed, the more I got infatuated with it. The more absurd and disjointed the story grew, the more deeply and precisely human Ed Crane became to my eyes.
In that way it reminded me of Barry Lyndon. Cold period (or even genre?) pieces about unremarkable individuals, yet incredibly moving experiences about the condition of man at large in the end.
The strangely poetic conclusion was absolutely perfect.
I woke up, thinking about the movie.
I did some reading online and was surprised to see it compared to, or even labelled as an adaptation of, Camus’ Stranger.
While the main characters of both that book and this movie share an inadequacy (to say the least) to human society, that relation sounded wrong to me, for a reason which made me wanting to write about.
The Stranger’s story is, to me, an allegory of the Philosopher worshipping his truth, and how absurd that pursuit is in a nihilist world. The Man Who Wasn’t There is a much broader nihilistic tale, I thought, and certainly not a tale about a man living and dying for his own truth.
The opinions I read about both works seemed to often imply the characters were doing it for their own ego (which can be argued), but very peculiar aspects of said ego: Mersault would thus be a “poser”; and Crane supposed to be trying to reach the light and ultimately succeeding by being seen on the chair.
To me, that is the exact opposite of both stories’ point but it is also telling how ironic, from my point of view, it is that their writers’ statement itself, in a meta way, is as misunderstood as the characters they depict. That (relatively) so many people voicing their opinion online wish to infuse those characters with egocentric petty concerns or a pursuit of those “15 minutes of fame” might be quite telling, thanks to the mirror handed by both works.
But the irony could be as well on me, as I am probably infusing the aforementioned characters with ideas of my own, desperate for glimpses of other people feeling and writing about the desperate loneliness of loss.
How did you feel about Francis McDormand’s character killing herself off-screen? That was a large part of the reason this movie kind of lost me. After Tony Shalhoub’s lawyer character expertly setup the courtroom trial, having Ed’s wife kill herself was just so disappointing. Then later Tony Shalhoub was back in the picture! This time we’d get to see him do an excellent defense! But no, a mistrial.
I feel like the flashback scene late in the movie should have provided some kind of insight into why she killed herself, but it was instead a scene that strengthened why they were a good match for each other, but it also kind of illuminated that Ed never really got through, she didn’t confide to him why she was upset. Though I felt like the scene implied that there were maybe times when she would. I didn’t feel any unhappiness in their unorthodox relationship, just a convenience and comfort.
This might be a very awkward way to write it, but it was the “best” suicide on screen, if I may say so? Especially considering we don’t see any corpse.
Its brutal unexpectedness felt so real, making the event both absurd and horrible at the same time, as the incredible news can be in real life.
I also liked how it was introduced at the tribunal: us guessing from the entry of the judge what may have happened, then procedurally, with all the actors of society not giving a damn about the human aspect of the tragic event, and Ed and his brother-in-law left wondering.
That, too, was kind of awesome: the lawyer feeling duty, but then, when he sees no hope and a potential black dot in his career, grasping firmly the occasion to jump ship. Grandiosity, then pettiness.
Being comfortable not saying a word, being fine with people only being there.
That scene resonated especially strongly as an echo of the earlier depiction, in the exact same setting, of the now even emptier life of Crane after the suicide. Ed wandering into his apartment as haphazardly as before, yet that scene felt so real, so crushing to me.
I think the movie is a very moving love story (the last line is just so beautiful).
I’m sorry I am late on this one, I had a lot of last-minute unexpected personal stuff come up. I hope to re-view it tonight and get some thoughts written. I do remember this: it absolutely gets 40s noir nailed.
As I said before, this is my second favourite Coen after Lebowski, and in many ways they are companion pieces as kind of anti-noirs with almost absurdly laconic, passive protagonists. Lebowski goes down an overtly comic route, while TMWWT is much darker, but in both cases we’re dealing with people who have always let things happen to them, who find that taking active steps only makes things worse. In Lebowski, the only bit of active, Bogart-style detective work that the Dude does gets him a vulgar doodle and a sore head. In TMWWT, Ed’s one attempt to expand his horizons ends in murder, suicide and general calamity. He’s a man so passive that his wife’s adultery is just something that happens in a free country, until he needs the money that can be had from blackmail.
There are so many great things about the movie. Deakins’s cinematography is spectacular. Thornton’s performance, the incessant voiceover contrasting with his near muteness in person, is his best ever. McDormand, Gandolfini,Polito, and Shalhoub all turning in great supporting roles. The many little callbacks and structural mirroring.
OK, my take on this one, is that it is (double-checks…) in my
Simply Brilliant
“I don’t pretend to be a critic, but lord knows I have a gut, and my gut tells me it’s simply marvelous.”
…second-tier category of Coen Brothers Films, along with Fargo, O Brother, Where Art Thou? & Barton Fink, but below No Country for Old Men, The Big Lebowski & Miller’s Crossing. It could probably win out overThe Dude on any given day and get to the top there.
To wit, it is fantastic.
It harkens back, palpably to 40s Film Noir, not just in cinematography and period, but in it’s exposure of the tawdryness and compromises under the surface of “perfect” Post-War America. No one has control of their lives. Marriages are convenient, and even fluid (though that’s not talked about) as 18 years of Depression and War have left identities, futures and lives shell-shocked. In this sense in reminds me of The Blue Dahlia,The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity and Scarlet Street, all quite specifically. Ed is portrayed as having less control via deliberate actions, but so did the other fallen protagonists in the other films (with the slight exception of Ladd in the first, though he is a patsy and a schmuck throughout that film as well). Sure, Ed’s an anti-hero with no control if we compare it to Private Eye films. But I think this fits solidly in the 40s Noir film tradition/ James M. Cain-esque literary genre. And it’s sublime in that the Coens can recreate that, flawlessly, in 2001.
