Three titles

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in December 2001)

Maybe the title of the Coen Brothers’ new film, The Man Who Wasn’t There, gives the strategy away a bit too much. The Coens’ films have occasionally been criticized for having more style than substance, for constructing dazzling structures and surfaces at the cost of much emotional or thematic weight (although, times being what they are, they’re probably among the five or ten most esteemed American filmmakers nevertheless). Maybe the new film is their attempt to take this point of view head on – to construct perhaps their most dazzling surface yet, while making it harder than ever to locate the movie’s centre – indeed, glorifying the very absence of one.

The Man Who Wasn’t There

The movie is cast in the mold of a classic film noir – a twisted tale of adultery, double-crossing, sexual tension and murder, with lots of devious plotting, misplaced guilt, and juicy characters (with names like Creighton Tolliver and Big Dave Brewster). It’s even shot in black and white – although the tones have an ultra-modern silvery shine to them. Billy Bob Thornton plays Ed, a 40s small town barber who doesn’t talk much, except to the audience in his voice-over narration. His wife is having an affair with her boss, and when Thornton has an impulse to invest in a new-fangled business venture (dry-cleaning), he decides to raise the money by blackmailing the boss. Things lead to a late-night fight between the two men, and Thornton kills him, but it’s his wife who gets arrested. Which, of course, is merely the film’s first act.

Thornton perfectly embodies the character’s extreme recessiveness and oddly abstract quality – the character does the things that film noir characters have always done, and that we’ve always known to attribute to avarice or sexual jealousy or a wretched temper or suchlike. In this case, the motivation is stripped away – Ed just plays the cards he’s dealt, regardless where they lie with regard to the law. The film’s several references to UFOs seem designed to orient us toward the cosmic – and maybe Ed’s most tangible quality is a vague yearning for transformation. He becomes preoccupied with a young girl who plays the piano – he doesn’t have much of a sense of what the music’s about, or of how good she really is, but she seems to embody a notion of something finer. When she reveals herself to have a cheap streak, it’s basically the end of the road for him.

The Coens have fun with the classic tropes of the genre, and the movie is always entertaining. But it’s an odd project, and a bit of a barren one. Ed could have been one of the scariest creations in movie history, and I think everyone involved knows that, but the movie sells those implications short for the sake of a more insinuating overall effect.

Together

On the subject of easy-seeming titles, what about the Swedish film Together, which depicts life in a mid-70s commune? When I tell you the film concludes with a soccer game in the snow, uniting just about everyone in the cast (even the suspicious next-door neighbor), and with an ABBA song on the soundtrack, it’s fair to expect a pretty soft touch of a movie. And that’d be true maybe half of the time. But the ABBA song is S.O.S., the lyrics of which strike at least a slightly plaintive note in this context. And along the way, the film is fairly clear-eyed and raw about the limits of this living arrangement.

The commune, with its notions of openness and self-sufficiency and ideological purity, looks quaint from this distance – perhaps from any distance. Director Lukas Moodysson is hard-pressed not to play some of the characters purely for laughs – such as the born-again lesbian who zooms in on every visiting woman (for some reason, her ex-husband’s parallel discovery of homosexuality seems like a more meaningful growth journey). And he builds the film around a rather dull story of a woman and her kids who’ve moved into the commune to escape a loutish husband. But his vivid, intimate approach, darting between incidents, builds considerable authenticity, and the movie’s infectious quality ultimately seems legitimately earned. The film suffers though through being reminiscent of Lars von Trier’s The Idiots, another commune-based film with a more daring thesis and a wider emotional range.

Mulholland Drive

The title of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive definitely doesn’t give too much away. Skeptics might say that the movie doesn’t either. The Coens’ movie may have a man who isn’t there, but you can’t be sure that Lynch’s has any real characters at all. At first it seems to be about a young actress who comes to seek her fortune in Hollywood, and crosses paths with a femme fatale-type who’s on the run from something but can’t remember what. Hints of conspiracies and weird doings haunt the edges of this central story. But after about ninety minutes, the movie goes into a very different mode, in which the relationships between the characters have all changed, and most of what’s been set out so far now appears unreliable.

The internet is already full of speculation on what the movie actually means (there’s a particularly heroic effort at salon,com). I can’t add much to questions of literal interpretation (such as whether or not the entire first section is merely the dream of one of the characters). In broader terms, the crux of the movie seems to me to be the narcissism and self-absorption at the heart of Hollywood – the image-making and self-positioning. If this seems a rather old-fashioned theme, more suited for a Hollywood that’s largely been lost – well, that’s what Lynch gives us here: a faded, seedy milieu where artistry takes second place to staying on the right side of gangsters.

The title of Lynch’s movie evokes a scene that’s played twice in the film, first as the centre of an apparently deadly plot, the second time as a stopover on the way to another dumb Hollywood party. So maybe that’s a hint to what’s going on. But of the three films reviewed here, Lynch’s is clearly the least susceptible to conventional analysis and description. Immediately after watching it, I thought I preferred the relative coherence of The Straight Story, and I thought Lost Highway and Blue Velvet more scintillating examples of Lynch’s “weird” mode. But the movie’s stayed in my mind – not so much because of its narrative mysteries, but because of the sense that Lynch has captured the complexities of something real and significant while still indulging his considerable idiosyncrasies to the hilt. Lynch and Coen shared the Cannes best director prize this year, but I’d say Lynch should have had it all to himself.

(PS I subsequently returned to Mulholland Drive here).