Beyond the Earth and Sky: Dennis, Me, and The Man Who Wasn't There - Part Three (Part One)

Welcome back. Here's my response to Dennis, and part three, or four, depending on how you're counting, of our conversation about The Man Who Wasn't There. Click here, here, and here for the rest. Dennis's response will go up tomorrow both at his blog, and here. You may leave comments at either site, or both.
BILL: Dennis, I love your comparison to Melancholia. The power of that film's ending, as you say, comes from the realization that, from Justine's point of view, her state of mind, for once in her life, might be regarded as beneficial. For her, as the Earth is about to be obliterated, there is no horror, because whatever is to come after, even if it's nothing, can't be worse than what she's feeling now. Similarly, Ed Crane in The Man Who Wasn't There faces execution with hope, because look at what Earth has to offer. I realize I'm just parroting what you said in your last post, but what an amazing ending! I'm reminded of how Val Lewton summarized the message of The Seventh Victim: "Death is good." For some, and in a certain state of mind, maybe. Melancholia doesn't leave the viewer with any hope though, even the very grim kind that The Man Who Wasn't There does. If the endings of both films could be explained with one word each, for Melancholia it would be "Finally," and for The Man Who Wasn't There it would be "Maybe." And do you know, it wasn't until watching it again for this series that I noticed that as Ed shaved Doris's legs early in the film, so does Ed have his leg shaved in preparation for the Infinite. He even offers the slightest of ironic smiles, or glances, at the razor scraping away at his leg. Given his narration at the end, does he believe Doris is there with him? Ed seems willing to believe just about anything that will provide hope, so, you know...maybe.

For instance, he'll believe that Birdy is a great pianist. This was the section of the film that baffled me, on some level, the most, and for the longest time. Now I can no longer see where I was confused. Birdy -- who I think it's safe to say Ed is sexually attracted to, but that this is almost beside the point -- is simply Ed's last hope for life on Earth. There's an interesting parallel going on in this story with Birdy, and the one with Freddy Riedenschneider. Ed loses out in both, and I'd say that categorizing, as you do, Freddy's cynicism as sociopathological is so accurate as to perhaps be a little kind. He's not even that smart, as a matter of fact. He describes the Uncertainty Principle as the act of changing something through the act of observation, yet what he's applying this to is the revelation that Big Dave was no war hero, as he'd always claimed, but an Army clerk who sat out the war at a desk in San Diego. Big Dave, the thing being observed, was not changed by the observation. Big Dave was always that. His grasp on Heisenberg is about as firm as Larry Gopnik's is on Schrödinger ("I'm not even sure I understand the cat").

But anyway, Birdy. I think you have to understand Birdy -- not the girl, but the idea -- before you can understand Ed, or the film. Hearing Birdy -- Beethoven, really, but Ed is unable to make this distinction -- play the piano at the party at Nirdlinger's gave Ed a shot of pure beauty, and okay, Scarlett Johansson playing Birdy is part of that. The point being, for poor Ed, it was a brief moment of the kind of transcendence he spends most of the film searching for. And later, when Big Dave is gone, and Doris is gone, and everything seems to be over, that's when the emptiness really sets in, the absence. That's when Ed becomes the man who wasn't there. (When the film came out, I remember some critics claiming the title eluded to the notion that Ed was a guy who was such an empty vessel that he just got swept up in the film's action. This is clearly a stupid thing to think, and like an idiot, I used to hold that misinterpretation against the film, because if that's what the title was meant to mean, then obviously they'd screwed up.) That's when the film fades out on the narration "I'm the barber." But he seeks out Birdy, because he thinks he beauty, musically as well as physically, or what he perceives as her great talent, is all that's left. Life is monstrous, but if someone like Birdy can play music like that, maybe there's something else. Maybe the peace he felt in the church actually had a traceable source. What does he get? He's told Birdy would make an excellent typist. And also that Birdy never really cared about music anyway. If I was Ed, I might greet the electric chair with open arms myself.

Dennis, in your last post you wrote:

"Because The Man Who Wasn't There fails if it turns out to be simply a hipster’s pose, all film noir sheen and no substance. I think the fact that, as I suggested in my last post, the movie has its own texture and rhythms apart from those of the movies in which its rooted, that it is not simply an exercise in 'spot the references,' indicates that Riedenschneider’s uncertainty does not apply here."

I think you've pretty cleanly nailed why the Coens are so extraordinary, and how they challenge their audiences to keep up. At a glance, The Man Who Wasn't There is begging to be simply, and emptily, and tediously, taken as what you say it very clearly is not, a jumble of smart-ass cues from other films. The Coens have been accused of treating their films as this kind of playground for most of their careers, after all. But you've been right all along to point out that this film is "its own beast," just as you've been right to insist on the connection to A Serious Man. Because no, Riedenschneider's uncertainty does not apply here, because he doesn't mean a word of it. He doesn't care. Larry Gopnik's uncertainty, however, which is another thing entirely, applies throughout The Man Who Wasn't There. Larry may be much more verbal and manic and emotional (though he tries to tamp that down) than Ed, but goddamnit, after talking to you, Dennis, I'm about ready to regard these two films as twins.

So, okay, if this our last day, maybe some housekeeping? On the "liking characters" front, I mildly object to your examples, because I do like Holden Caulfield, at least by the end of that novel, and I do not like Walter Neff. Who could? The point is, that doesn't matter. This is actually a pretty big topic, as far as I'm concerned, and I'm not fully prepared to get into it all right now. Suffice it to say, sympathy, and empathy, should go to those who deserve it. Ed, I think, does. Neff doesn't.

Performances! I agree with you that they are, across the board, superb. I even think Johansson is very good, and I'm on record, somewhere or another, as not believing that she's grown into very much of an actress at all. More importantly, I think The Man Who Wasn't There may be the first time I really noticed Richard Jenkins. Not the first time I'd seen him, of course, because he's been around forever, but the first time I cared to find out his name. The way his head tilted back and his eyes closed for about a half second of sleep before his head rolled back around to Ed, and he said "Riedenschneider," is one of the finest bits of comic drunk acting I've ever seen. I've already praised Alan Fudge (who I've learned passed away last year) as Diedrickson from the ME's office, but I really do love the quiet yet subtly panicky discomfort he portrays in the few moments he has left after Ed's admission about his sex life.

For the main cast, I could go on and on. Thornton gave a brilliant performance simply by looking the way he does. He provides a clinic on minimalism throughout, which is somehow not crushed by the bigness of everyone else, from Frances McDormand's obnoxious, finally pitiable sot, to James Gandolfini's insecure bull-in-a-china-shop, to Michael Badalucco's Frank, who I think the Coens wrote with the express purpose of giving themselves a vehicle for their brand of literate, everyman speech ("What's the problem, friend? This is a business establishment, with posted hours." I like that Frank was prepared to begin an argument like that). I used to think Badalucco was one of the liabilities. I feel an intense need to be upfront about all my past foolishness.

And Shalhoub. I guess Shalhoub's Riedenschneider also provides a vehicle for the Coens' writing, but of course Riedenschneider is no everyman. Apart from everything else about the performance and the character, I was just thrilled to see Shalhoub back. He's acted in maybe a grand total of six or seven scenes for the Coen brothers, but somehow his Ben Geisler in Barton Fink established him, already, as a Coens regular, along with Turturro and Goodman and Holly Hunter and McDormand. It took, what, almost ten years for him to appear again, and it's been another ten-plus and no sign. But I love Shalhoub, and I love Shalhoub teaming up with the Coens. Why this happens so rarely is beyond me.

Finally, you ask what Coens film ranks lowest for me. Well, I'm afraid my answer is pretty boring, because it's either, depending on the day, Intolerable Cruelty or The Ladykillers. And mind you, I still like both. I think they're funny, and there's some very fine work in each, both in the performances and cinematically (I think what Deakins does in The Ladykillers is especially undervalued). But neither film feels like them. I don't know how The Ladykillers came about, but Intolerable Cruelty was a pre-existing script they agreed to rewrite and direct, and both films feel like something they had to put themselves into. Everything else they've made, including their two novel adaptations, have been very clearly part of them already. No Country for Old Men and True Grit could almost have been predicted as Coen films, long before either was made. But Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers seemed like coasting. As a fan, I admit I was worried for a while there. The fact that they've come roaring back with four great films in a row has sort of eased my worried brow on that count, however.

Now, take those two out of the equation, and rank only the pure Coens stuff, then I guess I'd have to say The Hudsucker Proxy, a film I still like a lot. I just think sometimes their instincts for the cartoonish are off, and the movie sometimes, in the early going, feels a little shrill. Also, here and there, there's a joke that I think is beneath them (the "crane kick" stance from Norville's dream sequence, for example). But there's a lot to love. In my case, the worst Coens film is the one I merely enjoy.

And what about you? How are we to close this out, Dennis?

The More You Look, the Less You Really Know: Dennis, Me, and The Man Who Wasn't There - Part Two (Part Two)

Excelsior, True Believers! Today is Dennis's day, as it should be pretty much all the time, probably. Here he gets a chance to respond to my post from yesterday about The Man Who Wasn't There, and boy does he ever respond. In fact he reminds me, as if I needed it, why I agreed to this in the first place. Without Dennis's breadth of knowledge and deep intelligence and thoughtful writing, I would have been stymied over how to go about tackling this film. If I want to match him, I need to work harder than I would without him. So here we go...(and as always, comment here, or there).

DENNIS: Right off the top, Bill, I have to say how moved I’ve been in reading your posts on The Man Who Wasn’t There, a movie which generated little to no interest from the viewing public when it w s released and holds somewhat diminished stature even within the cult of the Coens. I particularly value your adept and, yes, sympathetic way of sizing up the characters. TMWWT is certainly not an easy movie to love, like The Big Lebowski, or even to admire, like most of their others, either the “serious” ones or those that are more overtly comic. (By the way, I think you’re right to have so eloquently pointed out that this distinction between forms is a very fuzzy line of demarcation in their work. The uniquely integrated way the two sensibilities coexist is at the heart of some of the confusion about how to approach and interpret their movies, and their attitude toward their characters. But I’m getting a head of myself…). In any case, you’re doing a bang-up job of making a great case for why a little extra effort to do so can be a rewarding endeavor.

The thing I’ve enjoyed most about our exchange so far, and specifically in reading your entries, is how you’ve deepened my own understanding and appreciation of the movie by disproving the central tenet of the Uncertainty Principle, as expressed by the sociopathically overconfident defense attorney Freddy Riedenschneider. In defending Ed, charged in the murder of the desperate but, as far as I can tell, legitimate would-be dry cleaning entrepreneur Creighton Tolliver ( a man who certainly had his own vision of the future), Riedenschneider describes his client as the very essence of modern man, a schlub (just like you jurors) who’s not self- aware, calculating, intelligent enough to put all the homicidal pieces together, “too ordinary to be a criminal mastermind, a ordinary man guilty of living in a world that has no place for him.” The attorney invites the jurors ( and us) to consider the emotionless husk of Ed’s outward appearance— and we’ve been privy to it for much longer and in much closer proximity than the jurors have-- and conclude that the closer we look at Ed, the less sense he makes as someone not only who could be guilty of killing but also as one who is fully engaged in the business of living.

Of course, Riedenschneider’s tactic is completely cynical and misses what we’ve come to sense about Ed, that there is something there beneath the muffled, drained expressions, visible through the ever-present cloud of cigarette smoke, if we could be convinced to look closer, to actually see what’s there rather than just use the movie’s often sardonic humor as are a son to dismiss deeper inspection. Because The Man Who Wasn’t There fails if it turns out to be simply a hipster’s pose, all film noir sheen and no substance. I think the fact that, as I suggested in my last post, the movie has its own texture and rhythms apart from those of the movies in which it’s rooted, that it is not simply an exercise in “spot the references,” indicates that Riedenschneider’s uncertainty does not apply here. But even more so, the way you’ve located the center of Ed’s spirituality (and that of the movie) goes a long way toward illuminating what the Coens are up to in this movie in revealing the value, despite his counsel’s claims, of a closer look at Ed.

One of the things I focused on during my most recent viewing of the movie is the way the Coens provide the outward appearance of adhering to some of the obvious tropes of film noir and use them to expose cracks in the deadpan reserve of their main character. The one I’m thinking about primarily is that omnipresent voice-over, Ed’s narration, where 90% of Billy Bob Thornton’s performance resides. This is where you get much of the essential information about the way an outwardly unaffected person like Ed Crane sees the world, interprets the actions of those around him. So you get a lot of musing about his own limitations (“I’m the barber”) and how he’s been deadened by interacting with people who strive to put up fronts that are far more transparent than they can allow themselves to imagine, like Doris and Big Dave, or even the incessant talkers, like his brother-in-law, the owner of the barber shop where he works, for whom he has little patience or interest. But the indicators of what you term Ed’s spirituality and his willingness, his need to look beyond the arid surface of his life are there early on in the narration—naturally, since what we’re hearing turns out to be the verbalized writing of a man considering his life from what is essentially the end of it. It’s not unusual for a noir narrator to be cognizant of his soul; what’s wonderful about the way the Coens have written Ed is that his occupation, the thing he does to literally occupy his time, to earn money, to distract him from his own existential worries, the thing that he outwardly seems to do almost by rote—cutting hair—turns out to be the activity that frames the way he sees the world and muses on the big questions.

At first it seems like a point of view that is forced upon him by his physical position in his job— through simple proximity and positioning, he knows the top of a man’s head. Somewhere in the dark recesses of my own cobwebbed mind I even seem to recall one of the Coens (perhaps on the DVD commentary?) even saying that everything you need to know about the movie can be gleaned from looking at the many different haircuts on display. Especially to their detractors, this might sound like just so much more facetious Coen-osity, and maybe it is. (I like to think other elements in the movie are equally as expressive as the admittedly boss contours Ed shapes on some of those little punks seated at one of his stations.) But seeded in Ed’s narration is a kind of skewered philosophical musing that might sound silly or inappropriate coming from anyone else, but coming from Ed, as he scratches at his own deadened exterior from the inside, looking for some sort of illumination, it’s rather poignant. And it’s why I like your term “absurdist noir” so much. How else to characterize a hard-boiled picture where the narrator, instead of cracking wise about real estate or his own doomy temptations ala Walter Neff, muses about the implications of the scientific fact that hair continues to grow for a certain period of time even after a body has died? Of course Ed is thinking about death, whether it’s from an awareness imposed upon him before the fact (on screen) or one informed by the fact that he’s speaking from a time after which he’s experienced it firsthand. But it’s his connecting up of death, and the implications of death, with his occupation that reveals his yearning spiritual curiosity, one which, as you extrapolated so well last time, leads him to discover his own hopes for something bigger than the puny activities of a planet full of self-possessed people in the most unlikely of firmaments.

“How does the hair know when the soul is gone?” Ed asks himself, his readers, us. Again, the posing of this question, like Ed’s choice of words to describe the fact that he and his wife haven’t had sex for years, could be interpreted as sniggering on the part of the Coens, artists who are well capable of finding humor in even the blackest of death rattles, not to mention the excesses of dime-store philosophizing. But such an interpretation denies the hope with which Ed greets his own fate, during that chilling white-out when he expresses hope for a world beyond this one, where there’s opportunity and desire to explore “all the things they don’t have words for here.” It takes a bit of a leap on the audience’s part to accept the searching aspect of Ed’s personality. We’re more likely to laugh, or to look on him with a mixture of pity and sympathy, not unlike the way he regards Big Dave’s wife when she first tells him of her husband’s alleged alien abduction. But it’s a measure of the Coens’ sympathy (yes, I do believe they are sympathetic toward Ed and his sense of spiritual suffocation) that they find a way to expand upon this fantastical element of the story in such a matter-of-fact, absurd and yet poetically fulfilling way. Not unlike the conclusion of Melancholia, in which Kirsten Dunst’s cripplingly depressed Justine finds not only release but relief, maybe even fulfillment in the apocalypse, Ed greets his fate with acceptance and with hope. It’s a fate in which he is punished, technically, for a crime he did not commit but one which he knows would not have occurred had he not set the wheels of catastrophic events in motion (in the name of love and moderated ambition, as you suggest). He considers his fate during his last moment in the spirit of discovery, as a chance to finally become something better, something which transcends the pettiness, betrayals and hampered dreams of his earthly existence.

(This feeling of Ed looking beyond the haircut, beyond the temporal, whether what’s on the other side is paradise or the simple, quiet rest of obliteration, is the same thing that lifts my spirit when the planet Melancholia slams into Earth, yet shudder with horror at that tornado that provides such a ghastly end punctuation to A Serious Man. In that movie, Larry’s last-minute switching of the boy’s grades, something he’s “ettically” resisted for the entire film, suggests to me a capitulation to the indifferent, biblically-tinged evil of the way humans interact with each other that offers little of a similar kind of hope for his survival, either physical or spiritual.)

I have to start thinking about wrapping up this chapter, but before I do I just want to address that question of “liking the characters” again briefly. Do the Coens “like” their characters, or are they just perverse, cackling puppeteers? It seems fairly obvious to me that when people—critics, viewers, readers—talk of “liking” the characters they’re really talking about whether or not the writer and/or director care about them beyond their simple function in the construct of the plot. Are they just pieces in the puzzle, or does the puzzle begin to revolve around them, finding its way as a narrative because of what they do and how they feel rather than leading them through to “The End” like rats in a maze? Well, if you accept that this is the question, then I think you and I have provided plenty of evidence, derived from the film itself, not to mention other Coen brothers movies (Thank you for bringing up Burn After Reading, another of their pictures that I love almost without reservation) which supports the notion that the Coens’ ability to laugh at the situations their characters find themselves in does not necessarily preclude their sympathy or affection for their characters, or for that matter ours. Do we “like” Holden Caulfield? Or Walter Neff? Or Ignatius Reilly? Would we want to spend time with even an ostensibly likable and sympathetic character like Roger Thornhill, the beleaguered dvertising executive played by Cary Grant who gets swept North by Northwest through all manner of nonsense, none of which is of his own devising? Strictly speaking, probably not, though we certainly sympathize with him. (Cary Grant, on the other hand…). It behooves us then to remember that such “thumbs up, thumbs down”-derived assessments of the worth of character go not very far at all in illuminating what’s going on in any given film or book. And certainly the attitude of the artist toward them is not so easily summed up and deserves a little more investigation than the conventional wisdom is capable of providing.

Well, hell, I’d intended to touch on the performances a bit in this post too, which I find to be uniformly wonderful. But as one observer recently put it, I tend to be “one long-winded bastard” and have once again rambled on beyond my welcome. So I’ll touch on those superb actors a bit next time. I wish I could offer something more on your observation of real-world enterprise in TMWWT and The Hudsucker Proxy, but it’s been far too long—since its original release, I think-- since I’ve seen that movie and my memory of it is far too vague to be of any value here today. I’ll take it up as an invitation to see it again, though, as I’ve always thought that The Hudsucker Proxy is an undervalued movie in the Coen oeuvre. (It certainly proved, if nothing else, that a big budget was no distraction from their signature idiosyncrasies.) As we near the end of this project, I wonder, Bill, speaking as one Coen aficionado to another, what film of theirs might be lowest on your totem pole? Whatever your answer might be (and I suspect it’ll differ from mine) I have certainly enjoyed sussing out why, for both of us, it certainly is not The Man Who Wasn’t There.

The Facts Have No Meaning: Dennis, Me, and The Man Who Wasn't There - Part Two (Part 1)

Well hello, everybody! Welcome to Day Two of my conversation with Dennis Cozzalio about the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There. First thing's first: Day One, should you need to catch yourself up, is here. Second, when you consider that work sucks, it was inevitable that either Dennis or myself would find ourselves behind the eight-ball when it comes to posting exactly on time. In this case, Dennis (and, less immediately, myself) needs a breather for real-world demands. So tonight I'll be posting my response to Dennis's post from yesterday, and then Dennis's will go up tomorrow. The upshot is, this little project of ours will probably extend into the weekend a bit, but, I think you will all agree, it's no biggie. And as always, should anyone desire to leave a comment, please do so either here, or at Dennis's pad, depending on where your fancy takes you.

Onward!


I should perhaps have been more clear on what I took to be the source of the joke, or at least the audience’s laugh, in Ed’s scene with the medical examiner. I don’t believe that people were laughing at the situation, necessarily, or the reveal that Ed and Doris hadn’t been intimate in a long time, or that it was Big Dave’s baby. They were laughing at the choice of words, which means, to some degree anyway, they were laughing at Ed. Had he said something like “My wife and I haven’t been intimate in a long time,” I don’t know that the reaction would have been the same. This is why I think, and still feel, that the Coens were going for a laugh. But it’s strange, though, and interesting, because Alan Fudge as Diedrickson, the ME, plays the scene very straight, as a man performing a highly unpleasant act because he believes it’s the right thing to do. When he gets that answer, he gets out of that bar as quickly as he reasonably can, but the Diedrickson half of that scene is pitched at about the tone you’d expect such scene to be pitched. It’s as if Diedrickson, a normal human being, has suddenly found himself within the bizarre reality of Ed Crane, and he doesn’t like it.

That last point has a lot to do with my eventual turnaround on the film. You mention absurdity in your last post -- as well as the film’s “fun-house fatalism”, which is a pretty apt description, I’d say, and in this case may be the same thing as absurdity anyway – and that’s really the form of The Man Who Wasn’t There: it’s an absurdist noir. And Ed knows it, at least the absurdist part, as much as he or anyone else can know such I thing. He suspects, at least, that cosmic and existential absurdity has become the enveloping force in his life, and by the end he is trying, desperately and stupidly and ignorantly, not to mention uselessly, to claw out some kind of definable shape, or to maybe claw out a window to let some light in. Before I go too far with this, let me say that, while my not-quite-negative, but a least disagreeably bewildered, opinion of The Man Who Wasn’t There took a sharp turn towards the positive some time ago, I never had to explain that before, or even really think about it, until now, and my viewing of the film (my fourth or fifth overall, I’d say) the other night locked a bunch of stuff into focus. Two things, primarily, but the one salient to my current point – the other I’ll get to in a bit – is that while the film does stack tragedy upon tragedy, its structure is to stack absurdity upon absurdity. Some of those absurdities end in death, but that’s just a part of it. I’m not sure there’s a comic moment in the film that doesn’t have some amount of near surreal lunacy to it – take Tolliver’s sudden, grunting decision to put on his wig only after he realizes Ed’s visit is of a business nature – which I suppose is not entirely uncommon to the Coen brothers, but it usually has a different purpose. Most of the Coens comedies are actually pretty sweet, or light-hearted, or just goofy, and the comic relief in their other films tends to be just that (not always, but I’d say generally that’s the case). But the comedy in The Man Who Wasn’t There is almost entirely in the service of breaking down Ed Crane. Birdy’s attempt to give Ed a friendly thank you is played for laughs (again with the absurd phrasing: “Heaven’s to Betsy, Birdy!”) but it also serves to finally, and thoroughly, crush Ed. Not that much was needed to accomplish this, but after her thank you attempt lands them both in the hospital, Ed has nothing left, not even the sliver of hope that he could repent or find redemption (through music?) that put him in the car with Birdy in the first place. In the way it uses humor, the film is – you’re exactly right about this – joined at the hip with A Serious Man, but also Burn After Reading, and manages to be a spiritual cousin to both. It’s as if the Coens made this movie, and then decided to remake it by splitting it into those two later films. The hopeless, violent absurdity of The Man Who Wasn’t There became the film where a friendly and grinning Brad Pitt gets shot in the face, and the groping, spiritual absurdity (but, weirdly, not hopeless in either film) found its way into the movie that ends with the devastation of a looming tornado.


The spirituality of The Man Who Wasn’t There finds two expressions, one in the (absurd?) camera move that goes from a large crucifix statue in the Crane’s neighborhood church, down to a priest reading out Bingo numbers. The audience is initially led to believe the Cranes are churchgoers, but no, Doris just likes Bingo, and believes, in that wonderfully bitter line from Ed’s narration, that heaven was on Earth, and “if there’s a reward, Bingo was probably the extent of it.” Ed’s not so sure, though, and admits that, even though they’re not actually attending mass, he finds the church surroundings peaceful. But Ed’s mind is flighty and unspecific on this matter. It’s not that he thinks church, or Christianity, itself holds any answers for him. He just suspects that maybe something does, which leads to the second expression of spirituality in the film: UFOs. The comic absurdity reaches its apex with this stuff, but you’re absolutely right to say that it’s a testament to the Coens’ ability to find new ways into their characters. You also point out the national obsession for UFOs at the time the film takes place, but I’d also say that the Coens have steeped their film in pulp – that’s the source of Ed’s narration, after all, his scribbling for a true crime pulp that paid for his story from Death Row – to the point where stories from Amazing Stories sort of get mixed up in it all, too. But what I’m getting at is, the pulp expression of spirituality, or hope, or religion, or God, or whatever – for Ed, that’s UFOs. Big Dave’s widow thinks he was killed by the government (it should be noted that Katherine Borowitz plays this expression of grief-induced madness with a certain comic, twitching mania) because of what he knew about UFOs, which, while not the case, implies that Big Dave led an absurd existence himself, right up until he got it in the neck. In any case, it leads Ed to cast his eyes up to the stars and imagine something bigger that might possibly make sense of it all.


You ask at the end of your post about the idea that filmmakers must, for some reason, “like” their characters. I don’t know what it means either, and I’ve made my disdain for this notion clear in the past, but does it apply here? By which I mean, do the Coens not like Ed, or Doris, or Big Dave, for instance? To dispense with Big Dave for a moment, he’s a liar and a blowhard and he’s sleeping with Ed’s wife, so he’s not a good guy. But even he has that moment, when he confronts Ed, where he says, in effect, if you’d punched me in the nose, I would have had that coming. He also says he’s not proud of what he did, referring to his affair with Doris. His anger comes from the fact that instead of taking out some reasonable form of retribution, Ed has ruined him. Is there no room for sympathy there? More to the point, do the Coens see no room for it? Then there’s Ed, who does not, in fact, murder Big Dave – I think I’ve been careful about not using that term – but instead kills him in self defense. The worst thing he does in the film is blackmail, which Big Dave might reasonably view as way too far, an opinion the audience might share, but do you? Or do you blame Ed? Okay, yes, you blame him, because he did it, but does it make you dislike him? What do you think of Ed as a person? I think he’s obviously fairly pathetic, and would be a boring man to know, but I also believe that he doesn’t deserve his fate. Watching the film again, the other thing that really came into focus for me is the surprising, maybe subliminal warmth. It’s a deeply sad warmth, but I was shocked at myself for not seeing how important Ed and Doris’s marriage is to the whole thing. Even though his face never betrays anything, look at what Ed is willing to sacrifice for Doris – he and Frank put up the barbershop just to pay Freddy Riedenschneider, and at one point he even admits his own guilt, to Doris and Freddy, just to set her free. He tells the truth to them both, and you see that sink into Doris’s consciousness. When he tells Freddy he knows about the affair between her and Big Dave, you see that Doris, prickly, acerbic, mean Doris, is actually feeling remorse. Maybe for the first time since the affair began, but it’s real. And that is why she kills herself. If she had any reason to believe the baby was Ed’s, I don’t think she’d have done it. But for her fractured mind, the knowledge that she was carrying the child of a man other than her husband, who was now fighting for her freedom, was too much.

Then of course there’s that little vignette, a memory Ed has while he’s unconscious in the hospital after the car accident. A macadam salesman (Christopher McDonald) tries his pitch to Ed who’s sitting on his porch, until Doris comes home and snarls at the salesman until he leaves. Then she and Ed go inside, she fixes herself another of her ever-present drinks, they sit as far apart from each other on the same couch as they can manage, Ed begins to say something, and Doris says “Don’t, it’s nothing. I’m fine.” End of memory. The Coens have said that this was meant to be a memory that was representative of the Cranes daily life together, and as such, and even without that explanation, it must be the saddest moment in the whole film. There are clues, though, that Ed loved Doris, and maybe Doris reciprocated, but even if she didn’t she appreciated him. In the bathtub, when he’s shaving her legs, she says “Love you.” Was that true? For much of the film, I’d have said no. By the end, I would say yes. Creighton Tolliver’s need for a financer might have been the catalyst for all the death that follows, but after that each character has to make their own decision, good or bad, to keep this madness rolling, and one of the decisions Ed makes that actually makes things worse, is the one to stop at nothing, at least within his very limited imagination, to free Doris. Amazingly, The Man Who Wasn’t There has a beating heart after all.


Well. I’ve gone all this way, and haven’t mentioned the title (which might be self-explanatory anyway, but we’ll get to that) or the Uncertainty Principle, as Freddy sees and applies it. I guess I’ll let you pick up those threads, if you don’t mind. But one other thing I wanted to mention yesterday, but couldn’t find room for, and probably couldn’t find an organic spot to bring it up in any of these posts. Still, it occurred to me that The Man Who Wasn’t There bears some vague similarity to another, very unlikely Coen brothers film, namely The Hudsucker Proxy. As far as the era in which each is set, they are roughly contemporaneous, but more importantly in The Hudsucker Proxy, that film’s sweet fantasia revolves around the fictional invention of a real thing – the Hula Hoop. Meanwhile, in The Man Who Wasn’t There, Creighton Tolliver is attempting to spread the word and the wealth about the newest thing: dry cleaning. And look where it gets him! I don’t really know what to do with this comparison. It may be nothing more than a passing thought…

Me, I Don't Talk So Much: Dennis, Me, and The Man Who Wasn't There - Part One

Okay, folks, here we go, part one of my conversation with Dennis Cozzalio about the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There. The way it'll work, because of the time difference between Dennis and me, and our work schedules, is I'll post my half here first, and Dennis will post it over at his joint, and then his response will be added later in the day. Got it? Good! Let's do this!

BILL: Okay, I’m going to try to begin with a “grabber”: The Man Who Wasn’t There is the only Coen brothers film that ever made me uncomfortable.

Wow, who could ever stop reading after that bombshell? So let me write some more things to keep that momentum going. First, I should probably note that I do love the Coens’ comedies, but my preference is for their more serious (which isn’t always synonymous with “violent”, but often is, and also, curiously, is almost never antonymous with “funny”, which is more to the point I will eventually be making) films. The Man Who Wasn’t There followed two straight comedies, two great ones, The Big Lebowski and Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?. Even as a fan of both of those – especially the latter, at least at the time, though now it’s probably a push – I was raring for the Coens to get back to what, given Blood Simple, you’d have to call their roots. Except of course they have two sets of roots, their second film being the entirely zany Raising Arizona, so the tonal divide has always been there, and has always been hazy, Blood Simple having a few laughs of its own. This has also contributed to a common knock against the Coens, at least indirectly, which has to do with their alleged coldness, and, especially, the mocking and disdainful regard in which they supposedly hold their characters. As someone who has been moved by Raising Arizona, Oh Brother, Where Are Thou?, Fargo, No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man, even Miller’s Crossing and The Big Lebowski, and who loves HI and Edwina and Marge and Ulysses and Tom and Leo and the Dude and Donny and Walter, and so on, I’ve always bristled, at the very least, at this ridiculous criticism, especially since, for a while, this was received wisdom for a while. “Yes, they hate their characters – we must use this as the base from which to build our opinion.” That, and the idea that, with their interest in genre films and styles from early Hollywood, the Coens were merely constructing pastiches or spoofs or icy, ironic dissections, rather than real, full-blooded movies. The answer to that came from either Joel or Ethan (whichever) around the time of The Hudsucker Proxy, when he said (paraphrase): “We think, ‘Hey we like this kind of movie, let’s make one,’ as opposed to ‘Let’s comment upon them.’”

There’s so much that goes into my initial reaction to The Man Who Wasn’t There that I don’t want to get lost in it so early, but basically, with all this in mind, going to see it in the theater in 2001, I was mighty pumped for it. It was a crime film, specifically in the noir style, even black and white, a visual approach I was very excited to see the Coens (and Roger Deakins) take, and a wonderful cast led by one of my then-and-probably-still-I-guess favorite modern actors, Billy Bob Thornton (never have the Coens cast better than they did here). As for its antecedents as a crime story, if Miller's Crossing is Dashiell Hammett, and The Big Lebowski is Raymond Chandler (in a roundabout way), then The Man Who Wasn't There was James M. Cain, with some Jim Thompson in there, too. Cain's characters tend to have a lot of misguided passion, which Thompson's characters can have, too, but the very gradual shift in morals that occurs in The Man Who Wasn't There feels more like some of Thompson's work. But the setting -- the California no one else writes about, the everyday California, with small businessmen looking for some meager leg up, casual adultery, and one choice made by one man that brings down the whole world (plus, the final few minutes is straight The Postman Always Rings Twice territory) is all Cain. And I watched it, and I just didn’t know what to make of the damn thing. The tone of it had me all screwed up. Even early on, when James Gandolfini as Big Dave tells his story of World War II cannibalism, a grotesquely absurd tale that he uses as a punchline any time he doesn't like his wife's cooking ("What do I say when I don't like dinner?"), I wondered how seriously the Coens were taking this thing that I wanted them to take very seriously, indeed?

And later, with the UFOs, and Birdy's (Scarlett Johansson) attempt to thank Thornton's Ed Crane, which adds some let's say highly adult themes to some deliberately old-fashioned, rear-projected mayhem, plus let's not forget Jon Polito's very welcome return to the Coen fold, yet still, I thought (then), weird presence as Creighton Tolliver, the gay, innocent (in comparison to most people in the film), vain, and be-wigged dry cleaner whose search for an investor leads to the deaths of pretty much all the film's principle characters. All of this left me unsteady, in a way I wasn't used to with the Coens, who up to then seemed to be making one film after another that was pitched specifically to my sensibilities. Of course, it's hardly as if The Man Who Wasn't There feels like anything other than a Coen brothers film, and their movies always have jokes, but I felt like, for the first time, the charge that perhaps the Coens are too ironic for their own good, and less interested in making films than in mocking them, might not be too far off.

The scene that really made me squirm, when I saw it in the theater, is the bit where Diedrickson (Alan Fudge, one of an endless parade of unknown character actors in Coen brothers films who come in, nail the part, and then seemingly disappear from the film world once again), the medical examiner, comes into the barber shop where Ed works with his brother-in-law Frank (Michael Badalucco). At this point, Ed has killed Big Dave, after blackmailing him for the money needed to invest in Creighton's dry-cleaning business, using Dave's affair with Ed's wife Doris (Frances McDormand) as the leverage. However, for various circumstantial reasons, Doris has been accused of the murder, and was awaiting trial when she suddenly commits suicide. Diedrickson asks to take Ed across the street for a drink, and in a gorgeous shot of deep black wood and shadows splashed with white sunlight, he reveals to Ed, because he thinks Ed has a right to know, that Doris was pregnant at the time of her death. After a pause, Ed, staring straight ahead, says "My wife and I have not performed the sex act in many years."


In the theater, this got a big laugh from the crowd I saw it with. I didn't laugh. Not because I'm so much better than those people, but because, for one thing, I didn't find even Ed's ridiculous choice of words that funny, but also because I didn't want to. There wasn't much in that situation that I could find humorous, and it bothered me that, clearly, the Coens could.

Now, I realize this all makes me sound like a stone-faced, uptight prig. Maybe I was, or am, or something. But I found the film very frustrating in a way I didn't want to admit, because, Coen brothers super-fan that I am, to not like their new film, especially for these reasons, would be like admitting defeat. And of course the new and separate danger (not really) is that by admitting this, my eventual turnaround on the film, which came much earlier than my recent viewing of it in preparation for this project, it could easily appear that I'm talking myself into liking it. I do not believe that's the case, not least because even from the beginning there were parts of this film that I absolutely loved. There was nothing in The Man Who Wasn't There that I loved more than the sequence that has Ed putting his drunk wife to bed, while Ed's narration recounts their first date -- one which would seem to have offered little promise, but which also neatly forecast their future together -- only to be interrupted by a ringing phone, which leads to the killing of Big Dave, and Ed's return home, with clean hands, to resume his narration, the shadows of lacey curtains fluttering over his face, while Beethoven's "Piano Sonata, Opus 79" (I had to look that up) underlines all this awful grimness with counterintuitive beauty. This sequence is as good as anything the Coens have ever done, and it's the sort of thing I held onto tightly as I left the theater in 2001.

Boy, there's a lot more. The UFOs, the performances, the strange, shaggy final stretch, Freddy Riedenschneider, Ed's strange and empty pursuit for redemption, what that title's all about, not to mention, among other unmentioned things, my final turnaround. But what about you? Did this film ever make you uneasy? Does the film seem anything like the strangest of the Coens films, as I, changed opinion or not, persist in believing? Just what do you make of this?


DENNIS: Bill, as I was settling down to watch The Man Who Wasn’t There in preparation for the journey you and I are undertaking this week, your recounting of your experience with the audience guffawing over Ed Crane’s numb, detached expression when he says, “My wife and I have not performed the sex act in many years” struck a couple of different chords for me. First, it seems to me many audience members who are going to make the trek out to a theater to see what amounts to American art-house fare from the Coen Brothers are often overly eager to share just how tight they are on what they perceive to be the filmmakers’ wavelength, so much so that no slight joke or snide aside is small enough to not warrant a hearty guffaw. And certainly given the context in which it occurs, a guffaw seems mightily inappropriate. It didn’t seem to me, in viewing the scene last night, that even the Coen brothers, masters of morbid mirth that they may be, were inviting derision here, piling upon humiliation upon numbing loss just for the fun of it. It seemed to me they were giving Billy Bob Thornton’s character some room for his existential exhaustion at this point. I didn’t feel them going for the laugh here. Ed’s phrasing, his detachment from any kind of emotional involvement at this point, is expressed with chilling empathy through the passionless disregard for euphemism with which he describes his sex life with the recently deceased (and, as it is revealed, three months pregnant) Doris, and I think the Coens respect that in this moment. The audience you saw it with, it seems to me, may have been looking for some kind of release, or an indication that the smothering sensation they may have been feeling needn’t be taken all that seriously, and that they laughed doesn’t necessarily mean that they were responding to cues that were placed there by the filmmakers. Sometimes one man’s weary verbiage is simply one man’s weary verbiage. (Maybe the resistance to this movie is rooted in its humor being much more of a intellectual construct than usual, even for the Coens? One of the funniest things in the movie is when Scarlett Johannson's Birdy, after a failed audition with a renowned piano teacher at Ed's insistence, turns to him and confesses that she has no ambition to pursue music professionally, that she hasn't the passion for it. "But you," she says to Ed's deadpan mug, "you're an enthusiast!" It's a great comic moment, and I've never laughed out loud at it.)


The other thing that I realized as I began watching the movie last night, in addition to the fact that I probably hadn’t seen it in upwards of 10 years, was the fact that I didn’t remember being aware of the audience’s reactions, positive or negative, annoying or reassuring, because I never saw the movie with an audience. My first exposure to The Man Who Wasn’t There came several months before it was released here in the U.S. when I created the closed-captioning stream for the movie’s original VHS/DVD home video release, and it has the distinction of being, alongside Intolerable Cruelty, one of only two Coen brothers features I’ve never seen projected in a theater. (I even saw The Ladykillers in 35mm.) Seeing a movie this way means a specific kind of detachment is imposed on the experience from the start, because it requires breaking down the movie into lines of dialogue and patterns of shots and shot changes before you’ve had the chance to establish any kind of familiarity with it at all. Depending on the quality of the movie you’re seeing this way, it can actually help make the experience more pleasant— after all, some (most?) movies don’t give you even this much to think about on their own. But seeing a Coen Brothers movie this way first is to put it, and yourself, at a disadvantage. When the movie was eventually released, during its brief stay in American theaters, I never got a chance to see it (and may have felt less inclined because I’d already been exposed to it). So I never had the privilege of luxuriating in Roger Deakins’ radiantly bleak chiaroscuro cinematography on the big screen, and two or three DVD screening s in the interim years have done nothing to console me in that regard.

Disregarding all that and to attempt to answer your question, what, after all these years, to make of The Man Who Wasn’t There? I’m very interested, as I know you are, in trying to figure out why the movie has held my imagination over the course of a decade, even when the movie’s almost perverse shifts in tone, its deliberate attempt to keep its viewer off-balance, in a disoriented state somewhat resembling Ed’s moral and emotional lethargy, almost seem to invite disengagement. It s telling that the Coens, after having won an Oscar for Fargo, following that film up with the often literally shaggy The Big Lebowski and then stumbling into perhaps their most unlikely box-office success, O Brother Where Art Thou, would then continue to focus on making movies whose central motivation seem to be amusing their creators rather than appeasing audience demographics. This is important because, for the most part, the Coens aren’t interested in telling stories that are deliberately off-putting or insular—they deal for the most part in familiar Hollywood genre types, not for the purpose of deconstructing or commenting on them, as you pointed out, but because these are the movies that hook them as storytellers, and viewers, and luckily for us they just happen to come at those genres from a slightly different angle. Even their most straightforward genre exercises, like the Hammett-influenced Miller’s Crossing or last year’s True Grit, are enlivened and empowered by their sensibility while remaining true to the elements that general audiences would find most appealing about a fast-paced gangster tale or a laconic, elemental western.


But it does seem that The Man Who Wasn’t There is a special beast. I think you’re spot on to suggest that while the movie starts us off in James M. Cain territory, it deposits us somewhere nearer the bleak, scorched terrain of Jim Thompson. It is Thompson who might have, as the Coens do here, insisted that we indulge in the thorny issue of identifying with, or at least willingly spending time inside the head of this largely passive sociopath Ed Crane and, without insisting on redemption, recognizing in his behavior the way in which we might also have made similar choices. But for all the talk of The Man Who Wasn’t There being some kind of precious, insider neo-noir pastiche, how it actually plays it has precious little to do with the kind of lurid sexual gamesmanship of The Postman Always Rings Twice, the raw tabloid energy of pictures like The Killing (written by Thompson) or noirs like Crime Wave or Narrow Margin, or even the queasy fatalism of something like Two Seconds or Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour.The movie’s stillness, in regarding Ed’s deadpan, perpetually smoking visage which is always taking in what’s going on-- or not going on-- around him with apparent cynical reserve (or is it just a lack of certainty?), and its unfalteringly steady procession through a grim series of events in practically a benumbed hush, seems to me distinctly European. (Roger Deakins’ inarguably gorgeous black-and-white cinematography contributes to this disassociation—there’s nothing on display here that mixes the picturesque and the perverse with the stark roughness of something like Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past or Don Siegel’ The Big Steal.)

What’s more, the movies that this one clearly has on its radar-- pictures like The Postman Always Rings Twice and Scarlet Street and Detour-- don’t feel anything like this one. The Coens would scoff at the idea, but at times The Man Who Wasn’t There, more contemplative than brash or mean, most resembles a noir Robert Bresson might have made, albeit one with scores of dry, wisecracking allusions to modern alienation and even modern aliens, of the UFO kind. This movie embraces the stately, unassumingly attractive small-town California milieu and creates in it the palpable presence of a vaguely sinister energy. It gives you time to really contemplate the intimidating depth of those dark shadows. And those shifts in tone you allude to at the end, especially the ones involving the presence of creatures from another planet who at least one character believes may have contributed in a significant way to the pileup of tragedy upon tragedy in the film’s plot, are jarring, at first. But they also indicate the Coens’ instincts for trying to find an alternate way into the heads of the characters, and alluding to a national obsession with possible life on other planets that was gaining traction during the time this movie takes place, seems a legitimate way of going about that business—even if it would have never occurred to Jim Thompson. It seems initially jokey, but ultimately it becomes, I think, more than that.


The best joke, however, the one that truly reflects the fun-house-mirror fatalism of the Coens storytelling worldview, is that in The Man Who Wasn’t There no one is convicted or punished for anything they actually did—the driest chuckle is reserved for those who are hung out to dry for someone’s else transgression—and for those who do take their deserved lumps for lesser misbehavior, the punishment is wildly disproportionate to the crime. (For a movie that is ostensibly steeped in the visual iconography of film noir—it’s really more an impression of that visual iconography—there are surprisingly few obvious nods to other movies, but the one that stuck out to me as much in 2001 as it did last night was the brothers’ pitch-black tribute to the underwater fate of Shelley Winters in Night of the Hunter, substituting Jon Polito’s bewigged would-be dry cleaning magnate for the starlet and her long, flowing locks.)

There’s so much more to talk about regarding this movie. Thankfully we don’t have to take care of it all at once. So I’ll leave for next time my thoughts about what the title means. I’m glad you mentioned the sequence where Ed has his fatal meeting with Big Dave at Nirdlinger’s department store. I love that sequence too. It's a typically thrilling touch that Ed's own narration is interrupted by Big Dave's call, and then after Ed returns to the house to see his wife asleep as she was when he left, the narration picks up right where the interruption occurred. I also would like to delve a little deeper into this widely accepted, utterly nonsensical platitude regarding the Coens and the alleged disdain they have for their characters. Even if it were true, who was it that decreed filmmakers have to “like” (whatever that means) every character they present? Does dislike preclude artistic or narrative validity? What about Freddy Riedenschneider and the uncertainty principle? And to connect up with another bedeviled Coen protagonist, do you think there’s a link between Ed Crane and Larry Gopnik? (Ed is, after all, a very serious man.) As it turns out, there’s plenty there in The Man Who Wasn’t There, and maybe we can find words for some of the things that they didn’t have words for in Ed Crane’s ill-fated universe.

Modern Man

Back in 2009, Dennis Cozzalio, of the very wonderful blog Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule teamed up and pooled together our superhuman powers (he can fly, I can chew glass) to discuss Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds in depth, over the course of four blog posts, each one going up not quite, but near enough, simultaneously both at SLIFR and right here at TKOFYH (that's the first time I've ever acronym-ized my blog, and it gave me a huge adrenaline rush). These seemed to go well for both of us. So, a while back, Dennis and I were talking about the Coen brothers, and at some point the conversation turned to their film The Man Who Wasn't There, which we both seem to have the same reaction to. I don't want to speak for Dennis, though, so I can only speak for myself when I say that this reaction is basically "That's a great movie. What the fuck is it?"

Dennis, then or later, suggested that he and I tackle this most peculiar of Coen brothers films in the same way we did Inglourious Basterds. So, beginning Wednesday, probably at night some time (if you're on the East Coast, anyway) Dennis and I will once again join forces, Dennis soaring through the air, and I eating whatever glass objects our foes hurl at us, to take on The Man Who Wasn't There. Currently, this project is pegged to last three days, but you never know, it could end earlier or later than that. We will have to See How It Goes, as they say. But so anyway, that's the plan, Stan. Be there! Or here!

Expressionism

Why Didn't You Help Me?

[Spoilers for Stuart Gordon's Stuck follow]

Stuart Gordon’s Stuck is based on the true story of Chante Jawan Mallard, who, one night while driving drunk and high on Ecstasy, ran into Gregory Glen Biggs with such force that his body was thrown halfway through her windshield. Instead of stopping, she drove home with Biggs, who at this point was still alive, stuck there. She parked her car in her garage and left him, where he died about two hours later. Which means there was plenty of time to save his life, but Mallard, a nurse, never called anyone to help. Until after he’d died, that is, at which time she sought help from her brother who helped dispose of the corpse.

This was in 2001, and was a big news story, as tends to be the case when someone behaves in a fashion either so brutal or so callous that most people (let’s hope) have a hard time even processing the information. The case was mined for TV episodes here and there, but the only person to approach it cinematically is Gordon, he of Re-Animator and From Beyond fame. Though Stuck is regularly categorized as a horror film – and the material could certainly have been used that way – it’s closer to Edmond among Gordon’s work, and is still different from that film in that it is really a crime film (a fact which would seem to pair it off naturally with Gordon’s King of the Ants, except that nothing pairs off naturally with King of the Ants) about, as so many crime films are, moral decay. Very sudden moral decay, moral decay depicted via time-lapse photography. In the film, Mena Suvari plays Brandi (Stuck is heavily fictionalized, so the characters’ names have all been changed and so forth), a nurse at an elderly care facility, as was Mallard. Intriguingly, she is shown early in the film to be good at what she does, and caring. This is done in a very Stuart Gordon-ian way by having one of her patients defecate in his bed, a regular occurrence, the nasty clean-up of which the patient always insists be done by Brandi (not out of any kind of demented cruelty, we gather, but because she is a comforting presence for the old man). I can’t really imagine doing a job like that, day after day, so from where I sit Brandi, at this early stage, occupies a higher plane of selflessness than I can claim for myself. She doesn’t perform this task, or any part of her job, with huffy disdain, but as warmly and professionally as she can. She is good enough at her job, in fact, that her boss (Carolyn Purdy-Gordon) hints that she is being seriously considered for a promotion.


But as we will soon learn, Brandi is nowhere close to being perfect. In her off hours, she associates with drug dealers, such as her boyfriend, Rashid, played by Russell Hornsby. It is after a night of revelry, or debauchery, depending on how you approach such things, that Brandi thinks nothing of driving home high and intoxicated, and plows into Tom (Stephen Rea), whose sad state of affairs, which includes joblessness and homelessness, has been playing out in parallel with Brandi’s day. Outside of one homeless man (Lionel Mark Smith), among whose ranks Tom now finds himself, no one has treated him with any kindness on the day that would appear to be his last. He’s been given several choices – by his awful landlord, by an obnoxious case worker at a job interview – that offer no choice at all. Vacate your apartment and leave all your belongings until you can pay the rent, or else. Fill out and mail in the form that got you this interview in the first place, but which has been lost, or have no shot at the job. Now that he finds himself near death and pinned by broken glass in Brandi’s windshield, the choice is all Brandi’s. And of course, she considers it no choice at all: go to prison, or let the man die.

Here is where Stuck deviates pretty drastically from the case of Mallard and Biggs, because Stephen Rea's Tom doesn't die. As Brandi goes about her life, albeit more hysterically and more recklessly, Tom, his legs shattered, struggles to live. This is not to imply that Biggs didn't do the same, but that he probably couldn't. Gordon makes it possible for Tom to survive as a way to gain for Biggs some measure of revenge. I don't claim to know that Stuart Gordon was trying for this, but Stuck works that way all the same. Stuck becomes a film about moral choices, which should go without saying, and it carries a strong contempt for those who refuse to make them.

I'll mention here that the film came under some small amount of fire, from various quarters, for changing the race of the female perpetrator -- Mallard was black, Suvari is white -- but any hint of PC cowardice that you might think is implied by this choice is washed away by actually watching the film. But never mind why -- I'll go ahead and continue to assume things about Gordon's motives and say that to introduce the race issue would be to confuse the issues Gordon cares about. Stuck is a film that is neither PC, nor interested in appearing ostentatiously un-PC. It's an angry film that refuses to set up easy targets (except for maybe the landlord and the job interview guy, but it's necessary to depict Tom at his lowest point when the car hits him). He does this by pulling from Mallard's life the fact that she was a nurse and caregiver who is outwardly good and helpful and selfless, but only so long, perhaps, as she's paid to be that way. It may not even be that cynical, though. It may simply be a touch more misanthropic. To paraphrase Chinatown, Stuck could simply be acknowledging that in the right place, and in the right time, people are capable of anything. You're only as good as the choices you've been forced to make. It's not hard to understand the difficulty of Brandi's choice, and lesser circumstances have driven people to murder before, but as Tom is reminded again and again, sometimes, even when presented with two distinct choices, you have no choice at all. Brandi (and Mallard) had to choose between their own well-being at the expense of another, and saving a life in an act that would land her in jail. Morality demands only one option.

The most bracing aspect of Stuck is its revenge-from-beyond-the-grave ending. Tom lives, and escapes, and brings down, both directly and indirectly, those who would let him die (or murder him outright). His choice in the film is death or self-preservation, and finally self-defense. When faced with the option of killing someone who he's now rendered helpless, he doesn't do it. But that person, the one who is helpless before him, dies anyway because they still can't face the consequences. This act is not like all those films where revenge comes after the hero has removed the gun from the villain's head and grunted "You're not worth it!", only have to have Gary Busey or whoever pull a gun at the last second, giving the audience the death they wanted without the taint of revenge. It's an awfully craven way to go about depicting revenge -- I'm perfectly happy, and entirely prefer, my revenge to be straight-up. But in Stuck, Brandi's fate is sealed by her character. Everything she does, including the last thing she'll ever do, follows logically from her decision to drive home with a dying man stuck in her windshield. Once that kind of selfishness takes hold of one's nervous system, it can be hard to shake loose.

So in Gordon's world, Biggs gets to live, and Mallard, who is still in the first long chunk of a very long prison sentence, has to endure more than she did in reality, and who can blame you for thinking what Gordon has imagined is only fair?