The Man Who Wasn’t There
A heuristic of mine, developed years ago, probably during the Odd Future era, that anything I find off-putting or alienating is probably good. It hasn’t always steered me in the right direction—looking at you Gaspar Noe—but it’s broadened my horizons and generally served me well over the years. Bearing that in mind, I am awarding The Man Who Wasn’t There the coveted Movie of the Week title because of how it confounded me, not because it is, on its face, superior to the runners-up. (Well, not only because…)
The Man Who Wasn’t There feels like a straightforward on film noir. Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton) is a grizzled barber who narrates his dull life with the intensity of Sam Spade. To him, haircuts are as intricate as murder scenes and the department store where his wife works is as bleak as Skid Row. Its depiction of post-war NorCal is as unforgiving as Chinatown’s backward-looking portrait of Los Angeles in its nascent stage. Everybody is crooked, harboring a secret and utterly bored with their current life.
Ed thinks he has a way out when he invests 10 grand in a dry cleaning business. His gamble does pay off, though not in the way he would expect. Rather than getting rich off of his investment—a brutal cutaway to a Life Magazine confirms he would have—Ed gets caught in a web of affairs literal and figurative. Fighting for his life against his associate “Big” Dave Brewster (James Gandolfini: one of the more intimidating Coen Brother antagonists), Ed kills in self-defense and suffers the sort of punishment that would make Raskolnikov blush.
At this point, the movie takes the first of many diversions, morphing from a nihilistic neo-noir into a desperate legal thriller. To mark this difference, we are introduced to the man of the hour: Tony Shalhoub, playing savant lawyer Freddy Riedenschneider. He’s Adrian Monk without the tics. He’s the kind of lawyer who does not care about the truth if the truth is not believable. He gets the big bucks because he will grab whatever shred of evidence might keep you out of jail and spin a whole quilt from it. He is The Ultimate Movie Lawyer.
Called in to defend Doris Crane (Frances McDormand), who has been accused of killing Big Dave, Riedenschneider speaks a mile a minute, often in the third person, as he searches for a solution to the problem. The Coens lean hard on the dramatic irony of the situation, playing a Rashomon-esque game with Riedenschneider, Ed, Doris and the audience. We laugh at the absurdity of the scenario that the lawyer concocts, but isn’t the situation absurd to begin with? The camera, which has been attached to Ed through the film suddenly takes on a neutral perspective during the attack: how can we be sure that our perception of the events on screen are correct? As the film churns along, elements of the supernatural enter into the proceedings, further blurring the lines of reality and hallucination. The resolution clarifies precious little.
Among the many things left unresolved: the title, which variously refers to three different characters. One is Ed, the detached spectator and narrator whose anhedonia keeps him at such a remove it’s as though he exists outside of his body. The title is spoken aloud by Riedenschneider as he concocts his own story from Doris and Ed’s accounts of the night Big Dave died. Then there is the entrepreneur Creighton Tolliver (Jon Polito), who disappears shortly after he sells Ed on a half-baked scheme to start a dry cleaning business. Any of these three have a claim to the title, as could the audience, privy to a story they cannot experience. Or might it be (high school English teacher voice) God—whose unseen actions bind these three men together?
Whatever the answer may be, The Man Who Wasn’t There concludes with notes similar to the ones that Chinatown struck so many years ago. Resistance against a corrupt system is futile. The line between monumental success and utter failure is startlingly thin. Drifting through life blissfully ignorant of corruption is preferable to seeing the darkness of society. That the Coens do not arrive at these conclusions in anything resembling a linear fashion is confounding and ultimately to their credit.
Bulletproof Monk
For my money, this is the greatest movie title in history. The image it conjures is so powerful that I saw a poster advertising it in 2003 and never forgot it. Kept from seeing it in theaters by my family’s draconian “no pg-13 movies until you are 13 years old” policy, it’s not an exaggeration to say that Bulletproof Monk was something of a white whale for me. I tried watching it on HBO MAX last month and was crestfallen to see it was one of those movies that they failed to convert from its theatrical ratio. When I found a copy at a Buy 2, Get 8 Free sale in Madison Heights, there was no question it was coming home with me.
I was pleased to throw it on and learn that, despite its poor reputation as a sub-Woo bomb, Bulletproof Monk is totally fine. The opening scene, a delicate wire fight on a rope bridge, is enthralling. The exposition hits the same precise beats as Kung-Fu Panda with an elderly Nazi seeking the key to immortality swapped in as the villain. If you are looking for an explanation as to why the Nazis dispatched a squadron to Tibet at the height of World War II, you will not find one in this film.
If you are the kind of person who is bothered by such matters, Bulletproof Monk is not the film for you. It will be infuriating to learn that Sean William Scott became an expert in kung fu by practicing moves he learned as a projectionist at a Chinatown movie theater. So expert, in fact, that he is able to defeat a gang of street toughs, dressed like Demolition Man extras, who live in the subway station. One of these brawlers, the daughter of a Russian drug lord, is so impressed with his skills that she becomes his girlfriend. It’s beautiful, in a way.
Director Paul Hunter, maybe the best music video director not named Hype Williams and maker of Michael Jackson’s iconic You Rock My World short film, is in charge. He could not care less about the plot. The dialogue scenes have so little energy that Hunter compensates by dropping gratuitous fist fights and sleight-of-hand theft into otherwise mundane encounters. I’ll give him a pass, not only because it’s a kung fu movie, but also because those dialogue scenes are legitimately boring. Hunter thrives in kinetic moments. It behooves him to keep things moving.
This makes for a rather rocky watch, to be honest. The titular monk (Chow-Yun Fat) never quite develops a rhythm with his apprentice. His bemused cool goads Scott into overplaying his hand. That Scott never decides if his character is a ‘reverent dork’ or ‘slick hustler’ does not help matters. The Russian love interest feels redundant to the plot and a montage in the epilogue confirms the audience’s suspicions, just as our boredom with the dialogue is echoed by Hunter’s machinations. It’s never a good sign when the makers of the movie meet the audience on their level. Thank goodness some of the action is cool.
The Eras Tour
I considered myself lucky to have seen Taylor Swift live twice—on the Speak Now and 1989 tours—even before tickets for the Eras tour spiked to $400 each at Ford Field. I was a Swiftie possibly before the phrase was adopted. (It was first mentioned by Taylor in 2012, two years after I downloaded her whole discography, two albums plus the underrated Beautiful Eyes EP that deserved its own slot on the tour, in case you were wondering.) This movie is theoretically for fans like me who still get moony over the first chords of “Our Song.”
Yet I felt nothing. If the goal of this movie was to inspire FOMO, it failed. If its goal was to capture the pure thrill of being in the same room as your favorite superstar, it fell flat on its face. There is nothing exciting, much less thrilling, about this presentation of Taylor Swift’s most ambitious arena tour yet.
This is due at least partially to the unfortunate fact that Taylor Swift is not a very compelling performer. Her banter is TERRIBLE. Her script is so refined that it sounds like she is reading a press release to her audience rather than interacting with them. Her doe-eyed smile of admiration that accompanies the rapturous applause between songs was anachronistic 10 years ago. She’s been touring arenas for half her life, pretending to still be overwhelmed by the moment, which she does a lot, is unbecoming. Her choreography has been an object of scorn for years.
Instead of focusing on what is actually exciting about being at a huge stadium show—that you are loudly singing along with thousands of other people while dancing with your friends and the most famous person in the world happens to be at the dance party too—Director Sam Wrench keeps the camera trained on Taylor for the duration of the (overlong) 3 hours that hit Disney+. The few crowd cutaways, especially to the young woman who burst into tears during the opener “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince,” got by far the most excited reactions of the night from the group I watched with. A little more of that could have gone a long way. Edited the way it is, it felt rude to sing along, lest we drown out the presence in the room. It was less fun, much less fun, to watch this movie than to hear any of these songs on the radio.
The Eras Ranked
Fearless
1989
Lover (I would be interested to see a version of Taylor who takes a page out of Springsteen’s book and swaps out the singles from this record in favor of, like, “Paper Rings” and “Cornelia Street.” I was surprised that she played “You Need to Calm Down” for a few reasons.)
Reputation (Maybe the only section that’s better live than on record)
Folklore
Red (This movie did not have to be 7% “All too Well”) [I also prefer the album tracks to the singles here. “State of Grace” was practically made to be played in a stadium yet didn’t make the cut??]
Midnights
Speak Now (I thought it was strange to play a pared down version of “Enchanted”)
Evermore (I do not like this album at all. 20/20 Experience Pt. 2 (Taylor’s Version))