|
|
|
THE BARBER MOVIE |
A Working Title
production
Prod: Ethan Coen; Exec prod: Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner; Dir: Joel Coen; Scr: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen; Ph: Roger Deakins; Prod des: Dennis Gassner; Cost des: Mary Zophres; Ed: Tricia Cooke.
With Billy Bob Thornton (Ed Crane), Frances McDormand (Doris Crane), Michael Badalucco (Frank Raffo), James Gandolfini (Big Dave Brewster), Katherine Borowitz (Ann Brewster), Jon Polito (Creighton Tolliver), Scarlett Johansson (Birdy Abundas), Richard Jenkins (Walter Abundas), Tony Shalhoub (Freddy Riedenschneider), Christopher Kriesa (Persky), Brian Haley (Krebs), Jack McGee (Burns).
International distribution:
Good Machine International.
|
The idea strikes Ed as a good one. He thinks about it, thinks of a way to find the money the man needs: $10,000, a helluva lot in 1949. But when he goes to see the man - Creighton Tolliver (Jon Polito), who would probably be glad to be gay in 2001 but is a closet ‘pansy’ in 1949 - the guy doesn’t even recognise him. ’Cos he’s the barber, Mr Invisible. Doesn’t matter, though: the deal goes through, Ed gets stitched up and a slow, inexorable, drip-drip process begins, downhill all the way, until Ed is so deep in murder and extortion that not even the best lawyer in California can get him out.
The lawyer - Freddy Riedenschneider (a flamboyant Tony Shalhoub - the guy from Big Night who was also the alien that kept having to regrow his head - “Have you any idea how much that hurts?” - in Men in Black) - tries, of course. Freddy’s gambit for getting Ed off is a version of the ‘Mr Invisible’ theory.
“The closer you look,” he tells the jury, “the less sense it makes. He isn’t the kind of guy to kill a guy - he’s a barber for Christ sake… an ordinary man, guilty of living in a world that has no place for him, guilty of wanting to be a dry-cleaner, sure, but not of murder.”
It doesn’t wash, let alone set. The days when juries blame society and not the criminal are 40 years in the future. But let’s not give everything away.
Shot last summer, mainly in Los Angeles, The Barber Movie boasts a wonderful cast made up of Coen regulars and newcomers. Frances McDormand (Joel’s wife), plays Ed’s bored, unfaithful spouse, Doris. James Gandolfini (The Sopranos) plays her boss, Big Dave Brewster, who manages the local department store, is married to the owner’s wife, and is having an affair with Doris. Michael Badalucco (who worked with the Coens in Miller’s Crossing and O Brother, Where Art Thou?) plays Frank, Ed’s brother-in-law and owner of the salon where he works. And Scarlett Johansson (the girl in The Horse Whisperer and soon to be seen in Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World) is the teenage daughter of a friend and neighbour with a minor talent for playing the piano, whom Ed tries to help in her career - with not much success.
But then nothing Ed does is particularly successful, despite the fact that - by the end of the movie, his list of felonies include murder, extortion, perjury and sex with an underage person. “The story has shades of Fargo,” says Fellner. “It’s about a small man getting into a big and ugly situation and his whole life spiralling away from him.”
Frances McDormand as Doris, the barber’s wife, and Tony Shalhoub as Freddy Riedenschneider, the barber’s wife’s defence attorney.
|
You could also say it has shades of Blood Simple, the Coens’ first feature, in that it is a film noir - literally: it is in black-and-white, glowingly shot by their regular DOP, Roger Deakins. And then you could say it has echoes of The Big Lebowski, with its focus on the details of a self-contained little universe - there, bowling; here, barbering.
It should come as no surprise to their fans that, in the process of working on The Barber Movie, the Coens have become fascinated with the haircuts that had swept enough of America to have landed in Ed’s barbershop in Santa Rosa, California, by the summer of 1949. There is the Butch, the Heinie, the Flat Top, the Ivy, the Crew, the Vanguard, the Junior Contour, the Executive Contour, the Duck Butt, the Timberline…
“I don’t know whether they do research or whether they really know this stuff,” says Fellner, “but art departments love them. And The Barber Movie is as full of those wonderful little details as Lebowski was.”
| “We’re only interested in it because it’s different from what we’ve done before. That’s
sort of what gets us going” |
In interview, the Coens give the impression of having an extremely laid-back approach to life and Fellner confirms that this is the case on set, too. “But,” he insists, “they’re the most consumately professional film-makers I’ve ever come across.”
Which really only leaves the question: who does what? Generations of interviewers have failed to pin the Coens down on this, but the best summing up probably comes from William Preston Robertson, an occasional collaborator who wrote a Making of… book about The Big Lebowski. Says Robertson:
“Joel, the older, directs. Ethan, the younger, produces.
“And vice versa.
“Except for the older, younger part.
“They write their screenplays together, alternating the order of their names from script to script.”
And what, you may wonder, does Fellner do, if the Coens produce their own movies?
“I facilitate their genius,” he says, breaking out into a chuckle at the sound-bite nature of the answer.
But it’s as nice a definition of what an executive producer does as you could hope for.
|
|
