ZodiacJack-2 Review of The Man Who Wasn't There

The Man Who Wasn't There (2001)

The Film That Wasn't There - (contains spoilers)

[1/10 · 7 November 2001]

The closer you look, the less you know. This is the favorite parable of the nihilist attorney, Freddy Riedenschneider, in The Man Who Wasn't There. It almost doubles as the theme; you just have to tweak the last part. The closer you look, the less there is. The Coen Brothers' latest offering plays like a David Lynch piece that never made it off the shelf. At face value is a film with some of the most talented actors around today, with the smallest yet most dynamic role going to James Gandolfini. Upon closer inspection, however, is a film that isn't there. It is tediously long, bogged down in narration, has no redeeming characters, and fumbles through excessive, uninteresting subplots. It is as if there were four different editors, all in conflict about where and when to end the movie. Billy Bob Thornton's main character has all the enthusiasm of a dying Eeyore. Something seemingly haunts his character but we never find out his interests in life or anything about his past and, thus, have little interest in his future. So he falls into some extreme bad luck and is finally convicted and killed, not to mention everyone else. His bad luck is over the top, however, and we, as an audience, cannot relate to it in a context other than a weird Coen Brothers film. Further, we have little sympathy for him when he dies because he was never alive. The other characters, which are virtually all killed off, have the same lack of a lust for life. Why Thornton's character is the main focus remains a mystery, because he is actually the most boring of them all. You can always count on great, quirky performances in a Coen Brothers movie, but unfortunately there is little more than confusion and uninspired surrealism beneath the black and white surface of this one.