Download The Man Who Wasn`t There

The Man Who
Wasn’t There
(2001)
The Coen Brothers
The Man Who
Wasn’t There
(2001)
The Coen Brothers
The Man Who
Wasn’t There
(2001)
The Coen Brothers
The Man Who
Wasn’t There
(2001)
The Coen Brothers
The Man Who
Wasn’t There
(2001)
The Coen Brothers
The Man
Who Wasn’t
There
(2001)
Cast
The Coen Brothers
The Coen Brothers
The Coen Brothers
Other Titles Considered for The Man Who Was Not \There
(according to Roderick Jaynes in his “Introduction” to the
screenplay)
I, The Barber
The Man Who Smoked Too Much
The Nirdlinger Doings
Missing, Presumed Ed
Mr. Mum
I Love You, Birdie Abundas
The Barber, Crane
Edward Crane
The Other Side of Fate
None Know My Name
I Will Cut Hair No More Forever
The Man Who Wasn’t All There
The Man with the Gas Hearth or My Hearth is Gas
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They got this guy, in Germany. Fritz
something-or-other. Or is it? Maybe it's
Werner. Anyway, he's got this theory, you
wanna test something, you know,
scientifically—how the planets go round the
sun, what sunspots are made of, why the
water comes out of the tap—well, you gotta
look at it. But sometimes, you look at it, your
looking “changes” it. Ya can't know the
reality of what happened, or what “would've”
happened if you hadden a stuck in your
goddamn schnozz. So there “is” no “what
happened.” Not in any sense that we can
grasp with our puny minds. Because our
minds . . . our minds get in the way. Looking
at something changes it. They call it the
“Uncertainty Principle.” Sure, it sounds
screwy, but even Einstein says the guy's on
to something.
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Werner Heisenberg
The Man Who Wasn’t There
Schrodinger Said:
"One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is
penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following
diabolical device (which must be secured against direct
interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter there is a tiny
bit of radioactive substance, so small that perhaps in the
course of one hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with
equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter
tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer
which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid.
If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one
would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has
decayed. The first atomic decay would have poisoned it.
The Psi function for the entire system would express this by
having in it the living and the dead cat (pardon the
expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts."
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The Man Who Wasn’t There
Inside Schrödinger’s Box
Schrödinger's Cat
A famous Gedankenexperiment, the paradox of
Schrödinger's cat, was intended to demonstrate that
Heisenberg's indeterminancy principle made no kind of
sense and offered his Is-He-Alive-or-Is-He-Dead? feline as
reductio ad absurdum evidence.
That Greg Bear would write "Schrödinger's Plague"--a
diabolical SF short story in which a pissed-off mad
scientist concocts an experiment using the paradox which
may, or may not, wipe out the human race--would probably
not have surprised the German physicist. But I doubt he
dreamed that his cat would show up on the big AND small
screen.
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The Man Who Wasn’t There
Schrödinger's Cat
In "Perfect Cercles," the first episode of Season Three of Six
Feet Under, in which Nate Fisher, either alive or dead after
brain surgery, must open his own closed coffin in order to
determine his state--this after he looks on, in one of his
possible realities, as a redneck version of himself watches a
soap opera with a character named Schrödinger! (The
episode was directed by the son of Magic Realism's patriarch:
Rodrigo Garcia.)
The final episode Season One of The Big Bang Theory has a
running Schrödinger's Paradox joke at the core of its first
date humor.
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The Man Who Wasn’t There
Schrödinger's Cat
In a Season Episode of FlashForward, Simon
(Dominic Monaghan), world renown physicist
and prime-mover in the series' world-wide
catastrophe, explains the thought experiment
in an attempt to seduce a woman on the train.
Schrödinger's cat is also mentioned in a
Season Two episode of Castle.
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The Man Who Wasn’t There
Schrödinger's Cat
And in A Serious Man the uncertainty principle
and Schrödinger both play a role:
The Uncertainty Principle. It proves we can't
ever really know ... what's going on. So it
shouldn't bother you, not being able to figure
anything out--although you will be responsible
for this on the mid-term.
— Physics professor Larry Gopnik to his
students in A Serious Man
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The Man Who Wasn’t There
Ed Crane, Narrator
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The Man Who Wasn’t There
He told them to look at me—look at me close. That the
closer they looked the less sense it would all make, that I
wasn't the kind of guy to kill a guy, that I was the barber, for
Christ's sake. I was just like them, an ordinary man, guilty of
living in a world that had no place for me, guilty of wanting
to be a dry cleaner, sure, but not of murder.
He said I *was* Modern Man, and if they voted to convict
me, well, they'd be practically cinching the noose around
their own necks. He told them to look not at the facts but at
the meaning of the facts, and then he said the facts *had* no
meaning. It was a pretty good speech, and even had me
going.
Ed Crane
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The Man Who Wasn’t There
So here I am. At first I didn't know how I got here. I knew step
by step of course, which is what I've told you, step by step;
but I couldn't see any pattern...
Now that I'm near the end, I'm glad that this men's magazine
paid me to tell my story. Writing it has helped me sort it all
out. They're paying five cents a word, so you'll pardon me if
sometimes I've told you more than you wanted to know.
But now, all the disconnected things seems to hook up.
That's the funny thing about going away, knowing the date
you're gonna die--and the men's magazine wanted me to tell
how that felt.
Well, it's like pulling away from the maze. While you're in the
maze you go through willy-nilly, turning where you think you
have to turn, banging into dead ends, one thing after another.
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Ed Crane’s final speech in
The Man Who Wasn’t There
But get some distance on it, and all those twists and turns,
why, they're the shape of your life. It's hard to explain. But
seeing it whole gives you some peace.
The men's magazine also asked about remorse. Yeah, I
guess I'm sorry about the pain I caused other people, but I
don't regret anything. Not a thing. I used to. I used to regret
being the barber.
I don’t know where I'm being taken. I don't know what waits
for me, beyond the earth and sky. But I'm not afraid to go.
Maybe the things I don't understand will be clearer there,
like when a fog blows away. Maybe Doris will be there. And
maybe there I can tell her all those things they don't have
words for here.
Ed Crane’s final speech in
The Man Who Wasn’t There
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The look, feel and ingenuity of this film are so lovingly
modulated you wonder if anyone else could have done it
better than the Coens.
Probably not. And yet, and yet--for a movie about crime, it
proceeds at such a leisurely pace. The first time I saw it, at
Cannes, I emerged into the sunlight to find Michel Ciment,
the influential French critic, who observed sadly, ''A 90minute film that plays for two hours.'' Now I have seen it
again, and I admire its virtues so much I am about ready to
forgive its flow. . . .
--Roger Ebert
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The Critics on The Man Who
Wasn’t There
Joel and Ethan Coen are above all stylists. The look and feel
of their films is more important to them than the plots-which, in a way, is as it should be. Here Michel Ciment is
right, and they have devised an efficient, 90-minute story
and stretched it out with style. Style didn't used to take
extra time in Hollywood; it came with the territory.
But “The Man Who Wasn't There'' is so assured and
perceptive in its style, so loving, so intensely right, that if
you can receive on that frequency, the film is like a
voluptuous feast. Yes, it might easily have been shorter. But
then it would not have been this film, or necessarily a better
one. If the Coens have taken two hours to do what hardly
anyone else could do at all, isn't it churlish to ask why they
didn't take less time to do what everyone can do?
--Roger Ebert
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The Critics on The Man Who
Wasn’t There
As my friend who loves the Coen Brothers' movies said the
other night, after we had sat through their latest cool, nearperfect puzzler, "I guess their problem is that basically they
don't have anything to say." This is more of a problem for
me than for my friend, generally speaking, and I found “The
Man Who Wasn't There" -- a loving evocation of the lowermiddle-class 1940s noir world of James M. Cain -- a
frustrating experience even by Coen standards.
I prefer the Coens in their charming goofball mode, when
they structure their all-style-no-substance tributes to movie
history around a comic-heroic central figure: Nicolas Cage
in "Raising Arizona," Jeff Bridges in "The Big Lebowski,"
George Clooney in "O Brother, Where Art Thou?”
Andrew O’Hehir in Salon
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The Critics on The Man Who
Wasn’t There
Seen in retrospect, even my favorite of the Coens' films, the
pseudo-profound "Barton Fink," looks more like absurdist
comedy than meaningful satire. Mind you, I have no
problem with that; the Coens can't resist these deluded and
pathetic lunkheads who must confront a ludicrous universe,
and their comedies usually provide at least a convincing
simulation of warmth and humanity.
Andrew O’Hehir in Salon
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The Critics on The Man Who
Wasn’t There
I'm much more mixed on the Coens' neo-noirs and imitation genre
pictures. I haven't disliked any of their later movies as much as I
did "Blood Simple," their very black, much-lauded 1984 debut. But
some of the same soulless sadism, the same juvenile-geek urge to
out-Hitchcock Hitchcock, resurfaced in "Miller's Crossing" and
even later in "Fargo" (redeemed as that was by the performance of
Frances McDormand). Of course I understand that for many of the
Coens' fans their bravura appropriation of style and sensibility,
their amoral mix 'n' match movie-hound aesthetic, is precisely the
source of their appeal. Perhaps the reported title of their next
project, "Intolerable Cruelty," is meant to tweak weepy oldfashioned humanists like me.
Andrew O’Hehir in Salon
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The Critics on The Man Who
Wasn’t There
“The Man Who Wasn't There," like "Fargo," is to some extent an
effort to bridge the gap between the Coens' comedy and thriller
modes. On the surface it's purest formalism: masterful black-andwhite cinematography (by Roger Deakins, the Coens' customary
co-conspirator), note-perfect character acting and period diction. I
mean, these guys pay attention to the friggin' details: When Doris
Crane (played by McDormand, who in real life is married to
director Joel Coen), the main character's alcoholic and perhaps
unfaithful wife, gets drunk at an Italian family picnic, she says the
word "goddamn" with the precise inflection of a mid-century
woman unaccustomed to cursing. Another character says "the
out-of-doors" rather than the more contemporary "outdoors.”
Andrew O’Hehir in Salon
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The Critics on The Man Who
Wasn’t There
Andrew O’Hehir in Salon
Specifically, ”The Man Who Wasn't There" is meant to seem like a
companion piece to Billy Wilder's 1944 "Double Indemnity" or Tay
Garnett's 1946 "The Postman Always Rings Twice" (both based on
Cain novels). We've got a tangled web of family money, unhappy
marriages, stifled dreams, greed, adultery and murder. In Ed Crane
(Billy Bob Thornton), the small-town California barber whose
misguided attempt to escape his lot in life ignites the drama, we've
got a narrator-protagonist so inscrutable that the more he talks the
less we really know about him.
This is the point of the film in some ways: No one can ever
remember Ed's name or place him in context; when he does
something bad he gets away with it, and the things he gets blamed
for he didn't do. But this sure doesn't make it any easier to like or
understand Ed. Like so many other Coen characters -- and, it must
be said, so many characters in classic film noir -- he seems like a
laboratory animal trapped in a cage of elaborate and beautiful
construction.
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The Critics on The Man Who
Wasn’t There
Late in Ed's running voiceover, when everything has gone
irreparably wrong for him, he reflects that he is indeed guilty:
"Guilty of living in a world that had no place for me. Guilty of
wanting to be a dry cleaner." This awkward, melancholic mix of the
poetic and the pathetic seems to be exactly what the Coens are
after in “The Man Who Wasn't There," and all I can really say about
that is that they achieve it wonderfully and I can't for the life of me
see what the point is.
Andrew O’Hehir in Salon
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The Critics on The Man Who
Wasn’t There
Late in Ed's running voiceover, when everything has gone
irreparably wrong for him, he reflects that he is indeed guilty:
"Guilty of living in a world that had no place for me. Guilty of
wanting to be a dry cleaner." This awkward, melancholic mix of the
poetic and the pathetic seems to be exactly what the Coens are
after in "The Man Who Wasn't There," and all I can really say about
that is that they achieve it wonderfully and I can't for the life of me
see what the point is.
Andrew O’Hehir in Salon
The Coen Brothers
The Critics on The Man Who
Wasn’t There
As Riedenschneider says when invoking Heisenberg's uncertainty
principle to bewilder a jury, "They got this guy in Germany named
Fritz. Or maybe it's Werner." What makes me respect "The Man
Who Wasn't There" despite myself is the sense that the Coens
want it to be about something that can't be described or defined,
even by Fritz or Werner. By the end of Ed's story he wants to
rebuild his destroyed marriage and tell Doris things he never could
before, and it almost seems like the same can be said of the
movie: It wants to break out of its aesthetic prison and tell those of
us out there in the audience something precious and impossible.
In both cases it's a nice try but a bit too late. . . .
Andrew O’Hehir in Salon
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The Critics on The Man Who
Wasn’t There
Coen Motifs:
Howling Fat Men: Frank Raffo, Creighton Tolliver
Blustery Titans: Big Dave Brewster
Vomiting: ?
Violence: Big Dave’s throat slit with s cigar cutter
Dreams: ?
Peculiar Haircuts: Ed Crane’s—and the film is about a barber
Lost Hats: Lots of hats worn
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