I own almost every Coen Brothers movie on physical media, and something that is immediately clear is that they are not very interested in talking about their movies. They show up for the occasional special feature interview (mostly for the Criterion releases of their films [Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, No Country for Old Men, and Inside Llewyn Davis]), but for the most part, they leave their movies to the viewers. So a director’s commentary is most likely out of the question. In fact, it’s so abhorrent to them that for the DVD release of Blood Simple they made up a film historian character and wrote a script for him for the commentary. That’s a lot of work to get around having to talk about your own movie. After that, there’s just the Roger Deakins commentary on the Fargo disc. So imagine my shock when I saw that there was a commentary for The Man Who Wasn’t There featuring Joel and Ethan and star Billy Bob Thornton. To date, it’s their only commentary. So I felt it necessary to check out, along with the other special features, and report on. But before I get into that, I wanted to share my personal interpretation of this forgotten, beautiful Coen Brothers film.
UFOs and Gullibility
Thornton’s Ed Crane is one of the quietest characters in film history. Without his narration, he comes across as nearly mute. Silent characters, and people in general, are sometimes perceived as smarter than the “gabbers” (as Ed calls chatty people). But I’ve always taken issue with this. It’s an asset to hold your tongue when you don’t have anything to say, sure, but that doesn’t mean you’re automatically some deep, philosophical type. Ed, however, fancies himself as such. But I disagree.
While Ed might seem to be a bit smarter than all the people chattering away around him, he actually buys into a lot of bullshit and makes plenty of mistakes. In his defense, everything he does is part of his quest to find meaning in life, but he’s too gullible about it.
Ed buying into the dry cleaning scheme sets everything in motion. Jon Polito isn’t even selling him on it that hard. He’s just another customer gabbing away during a haircut. But something about this futuristic new laundry method sparks something in Ed. Knowing his wife, Doris, was cheating on him didn’t spark anything, but dry cleaning did.
It’s impossible to know if the dry cleaning investment was a scam since Big Dave killed Polito. But regardless of that, it’s still a foolhardy investment that upends Ed’s world all done over a traveling salesman’s soft pitch in a barber’s chair.
The events set in motion by that investment through blackmailing lead to Ed killing Dave, and Doris killing herself in jail. But none of this brings him meaning, and he seems to just be drifting through everything. Two things snap him out of it: Birdy (Scarlett Johansson) and Ann Nirdlinger (Katherin Borowitz).
Birdy playing the piano skillfully sparks something again in Ed. He thinks he’s witnessing a prodigy that her drunk father (a great Richard Jenkins) is oblivious to. Ed takes it upon himself to take Birdy to music teacher, who breaks Ed’s spirit by explaining that Birdy is certainly capable, but she lacks the heart to make a musician. Ed is further crestfallen when Birdy admits that she doesn’t even care that much about music, and things literally spiral out of control when Birdy misinterprets Ed’s attention as sexual in nature and attempts to give him blowjob on the ride home, leading to a car wreck.
After the car crashes, a hubcap that looks like a flying saucer rolls along the road, bringing us to Ed’s final attempt to find meaning. The UFO stuff can appear as some Coen randomness on a first watch, but of course it’s more than that. It’s first brought to Ed’s attention when Ann, looking straight out of Plan 9 from Outer Space, shows up to tell Ed that she knows Dave’s death was all about an alien encounter they had while camping a year before. At first, Ed, rightfully, thinks Ann is having a breakdown over Dave’s death, but the seed is planted.
Once Ed is put on death row, his need for meaning brings back the UFOs. He has a dream in prison in which a UFO shows up. He goes out into the yard, sees the spotlight of the UFO, then it just leaves him there rather than saving him from prison and showing him another world than the one he knows. Ed then goes to his death, staring at haircuts and wondering what will come next, if anything. If not for Ann, he wouldn’t have even considered the possibility of aliens.
Just before his death, however, there is a seemingly mundane flashback. A tarmacadam salesman (Shooter McGavin himself, Christopher McDonald) approaches Ed, going into his spiel. Ed doesn’t seem too interested, but he’s also not getting rid of the guy. Then Doris pulls up, immediately rips up the salesman’s pamphlet and sends him on his way. As she walks past Ed, she seems disgusted that he had let the salesman get that far. Inside, they sit silently until Ed starts to try to say something, and Doris stops him. This is their marriage, and this is how Ed has been kept in check all these years.
This scene, or variations of it, has probably happened dozens of times in their marriage. Some salesman or con artist approaches silent Ed, then Doris swoops in to stop it. Without Doris to stop Ed with the dry cleaning plan, everything fell apart. Doris knew that Ed was gullible and couldn’t help himself when someone approached him with something new and seemingly meaningful.
Ed is definitely a deep thinker, as evidenced by the hilarious “You ever wonder about it?” conversation he attempts to have about how hair just keeps growing. But as Freddy Reidenschneider (the always great Tony Shalhoub) points out, paraphrasing Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: “The more you look, the less you really know.”
Trying to find meaning in life may seem like the smart thing to do, especially in the face of constant nonsensical chatter. But the more you search for meaning, the less you find as you miss what’s right in front of you. I’m not saying the film is suggesting that Ed just needed to pay more attention to his wife (though that would have prevented a few deaths). But it’s certainly suggesting that searching for meaning is pointless and, in fact, destructive, especially when you’re gullible enough to try to find meaning anytime someone approaches you with something as banal as dry cleaning.
Special Features
Aside from the commentary, there are deleted scenes, an extended interview with Roger Deakins, and a behind-the-scenes featurette.
The deleted scenes are hilarious. One is just Shalhoub’s opening argument minus the Thornton narration.
The rest are three haircuts given their own listing as a “scene”: the Timberline, the Duck Butt, and the Alpine Rope Toss. Literally each one is a three second shot of a haircut.
Then there's the pivotal “Doris’ [sic] Salad,” which is a shot of a wedge salad being placed on a plate.
When shit like this happens on one of their physical releases, I assume it's a joke, then there’s this line from the behind the scenes featurette from Ethan Coen: “The whole barber thing was really just a backdrop. The story didn't sort of catch fire [Joel starts laughing next to him] until we added the dry-cleaning to the mix. Then we knew we had something we could take and pitch to all the studios.”
These guys will do interviews and whatnot, but they’re going to drop in some deadpan jokes like that.
The One and Only Commentary
It’s shocking how normal of a commentary it is. Though it does have the rare problem of the film being a little too loud making it hard to hear the commentary at times. I was hoping for a full on performance featuring clearly made up stories and jokes. But it’s pretty straightforward. It is nice to watch a movie along with them, because you hear them crack up at their own movie, and it’s infectious. Watching this with the commentary definitely made me see this as more of a comedy. Aside from that, here are some highlights I came across:
Billy Bob Thornton claims he was smoking real unfiltered cigarettes during the shoot, then he would go to his trailer and smoke more, and he even smoked while doing the voiceover sessions. He claims this experience helped make him quit smoking. Though I don’t know it it stuck or not.
They joke about making an Ed Crane talk show
The soldier being eaten by the Japanese story came from Barry Sonnenfeld's dad. No telling how long they were sitting on that one.
“I love the dialogue you guys wrote for this movie.” - Billy Bob
“None of it for you!” - Joel, I think
Good for Billy Bob remembering that Abraham Benrubi was also in U Turn.
There was a deleted scene (unfilmed) in which Ed, the night he kills Dave, wakes up to a flying saucer being outside and tiny ant-like aliens come out. They opted for the Ann UFO story. If they had gone with this route, then my gullibility theory goes right out the window. Its existence even as a deleted scene still messes with it, I guess, but I’ve always found that movies can have multiple interpretations, so I’m sticking with it.
Ethan says they did a take of the police officers telling Ed about Doris being arrested in which “Ed fled the interview.” I just like that he used the same terminology as in Fargo.
This commentary was recorded on January 8, 2002. I know this because Thornton mentions that Dave Thomas died that morning.
Thornton fluffed his pants up to make it look like he had an erection while watching Birdy play the piano.
The commentary loses some steam in the back half, with multiple moments of them just watching the movie. You even hear them shuffling around in their seats during these quiet moments.
But it picks up during the credits with Billy Bob claiming he met Roderick Jaynes, the Coens’ fake editor. The Coens play along, referring to Jaynes as kind of a rough character.
They finish talking about a dude interviewing them at Cannes named Guy Pines, but “Pines” is pronounced “penis,” and how ridiculous it is to go with that pronunciation.
