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Saw this the other night. Liked it... was perhaps mildly disappointed, but then I do hold the Coens to a ridiculously high standard. And this promised so much... I'm not entirely sure it delivered all of it. Still, it made me realise that I'd happily pay to watch Billy Bob Thornton smoke cigarettes and cut hair in black and white for two hours. Maybe that would have been a better film. Kidding.
quote:Originally posted by Luke Wing:
Big Dave... is the man who was there and left sperm and blood behind him to prove it.
Ah, but isn't Big Dave one of at least three characters in the film who could be "The man who wasn't there" - he wasn't where he said he was in the war...
quote:In the end the protaganist simply dies because he refuses engagement. The prison doors open, the escape craft is waiting but he walks back into prison and locks the door behind him. The fantasy scene, while he recovers consciousness is a clear indicator why. He imagines life is back to normal with his wife alive, and their live of dull indifference and minor irritation has resumed. I presume he feels he might as well not be there.
That's an interesting interpretation: I took the UFO prison sequence to be the fantasy, and the scene after the car accident to be a flashback. The flashback to Ed's life with his wife gives it a slightly different spin to the one we had looking at things from his perspective: we realise that, y'know, this guy really isn't very bright, and that his wife looked out for him, keeping him from the mercies of conmen - which is off course how he gets into the whole mess.
As for the UFOs - I think this relates to the scene near the end where the lawyer played by Tony Shaloub is delivering his closing address, trying to make the jury think that Ed Crane is "modern man", everyman, a man out of place, a victim of circumstance, etc. This is something that the movie has been tempting us to believe, as well - but, it's suggested, this is bullshit. Everything that happens to Ed is in fact the result of his own actions - he sets things in motion by making a bad choice (both in the sense of stupid - of course Big Dave would figure it out - and morally wrong), and events just play out from there...
But Big Dave's scarily unbalanced wife believes that there's s something else going on: a conspiracy. People want to believe in a bigger picture, they want to believe that they don't have to take responsibility for the consequences of their bad choices - which ties in to what Ed's talking about in his final monologue, when the UFO appears to him in prison - I *think* (and this is where I'm a bit dubious about the film's ending) that he's come to take a kind of responsibility for his actions, and no longer needs the get-out clause of such an explanation. But I'm not sure.
Really good point about dry cleaning / aridity, Luke - I hadn't noticed that. God, but the Coens are clever bastards. I've noticed that if you watch their best films repeatedly, you see more and more stuff like that (with The Hudsucker Proxy being my favourite example - all those circles, karma, the great wheel...). Might have to watch this one again soon, too.
P.S. Anyone here seen Big Night? Do you think it was deliberate that here, the Tony Shaloub character is obsessed with food, after playing a chef so well in that film? |
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I know what you mean about the smoking.. kinda like Dennis Hopper in True Romance...