Other Titles • The Man Who Wasn't There (2001) • The Barber Project (2000)
Synopses for The Man Who Wasn't There (2001)
1.
For all of its late-1940s cold war paranoia, pulp fiction dialogue, and frenzied greed, Joel and Ethan Coen's The Man Who Wasn't There is their most cool and collected film since Blood Simple. An unassuming barber with a scheming wife (Frances McDormand) and a serious smoking habit, Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton) is an onlooker to his own life, a ghostly presence set against a silver-toned film noir backdrop. Only when he decides to alter his fate by blackmailing his wife's lover (James Gandolfini) in order to invest with a traveling salesman (Jon Polito) touting the wave of the future--dry cleaning--do we begin to hear the full extent of Ed's understated, existential lament. As his lawyer (Tony Shalhoub) says in Ed's defense at his eventual trial for murder, "He is modern man." Thornton's deadpan eloquence and cinematographer Roger Deakins's precision lighting offer the perfect counterbalance to the requisite one-liners, plot twists, and false endings that have come to characterize recent Coen brothers films. Almost in spite of the obsessive cultural references (flying saucers, Nabokov's Lolita, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle), Ed Crane steps neatly from the fray as one of cinema's most memorably disenchanted characters. --Fionn Meade
(20 votes)
2.
The Coen brothers' THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE is a brilliantly photographed black-and-white absurdist noir set in Santa Rosa, California, in 1949. Ed Crane (the outstanding Billy Bob Thornton) is a slow-moving, barely talking barber who doesn't seem to want much out of life. He has virtually no relationship with his wife, Doris (Frances McDormand), who has more fun with her boss, Big Dave (James Gandolfini). But when a strange character (Jon Polito) lets it be known that he's looking for a silent partner to finance his dream business (something he calls dry cleaning), Ed sees a possible way out of his doldrums. Just like any good James M. Cain novel (which the Coens cited as a major influence on the story), blackmail, deceit, violence, murder, and double crossing ensue, all with the magic Coen twists and turns.
THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE looks simply magnificent; the cinematography, the outfits, and the set designs perfectly capture this intriguing post-WWII paranoid world embodied by misfits, cheats, simpletons, con men, and other ne'er-do-wells. Thornton, who also supplies the wonderfully droll narration, gives a bravura performance as Ed, the everyman who has never strayed from the straight and narrow--until now. Always with a Chesterfield in his mouth, he wanders from scene to scene almost as if he's a spectator--even though he's at the center of everything that goes on. The supporting cast, as usual in a Coen brothers film, is outstanding, including McDormand, Gandolfini, Polito, Tony Shalhoub, Richard Jenkins, and Scarlett Johansson as a young potential piano prodigy.
(20 votes)
3.
The Coen Brothers are back with a dark and twisted film noir unlike anything you've ever seen. Set in a small 1949 California town, this is the story of a seemingly simple barber, who turns to blackmail and revenge to escape his achingly dull life. But in the tradition of classic noir, nothing goes as planned and nothing is as it seems. And as the barber's plot unravels, the delicious surprises, stunning revelations and just plain strange occurrences will disturb and delight you long after the film has ended.
(20 votes)
4.
With The Man Who Wasn't There the Coen brothers--those ironic geniuses of left-field bizarre--have pulled off another side-swerve into the unexpected. A movie "about a hairdresser who wants to become a dry-cleaner" as the brothers gleefully claim to have pitched it, it's set in 1949 in the small Northern California town of Santa Rosa (venue for Hitchcock's 1943 classic Shadow of a Doubt) and filmed in lustrous, deep-shadowy black-and-white--an affectionate, though never slavish, tribute to the great era of film noir.
Not only in its austere monochrome but in its tone, it comes as a total contrast to the Coens' previous film, the cheerfully picaresque O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Though they toss in plenty of surreal gags, including a whole running thread about flying saucers (this is Roswell-era America, after all), the overall mood is quiet, reflective and even--something quite new for the Coens--compassionate. Their protagonist, barber Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton, proving himself one of the great chameleon actors of our time), is a man trapped by his own impassivity--inside him, a seething mass of emotion that he's utterly unable to express. In true Coen style, his frustration leads him into a fatal move that spirals disastrously out of control.
Thornton is ably supported by a whole gallery of Coen regulars--Frances McDormand, Jon Polito, Tony Shalhoub--plus James Gandolfini (The Sopranos) and an amazingly assured turn from Scarlett Johansson (Ghost World). The dialogue, as you'd expect, is masterly, while the brothers' regular collaborators Director of Photography Roger Deakins and production designer Dennis Gassner work wonders of period evocation, and Carter Burwell contributes a haunting score.
On the DVD:The Man Who Wasn't There comes to DVD in a sharp, clean 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer that captures all the depth and subtlety of Deakins' superb photography, impeccably matched by the crystal-clear Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound. A lavish helping of extras includes a trailer and two TV spots, stills photo gallery, filmographies, a 16-minute "making of" featurette, an overlong (47 minutes) interview with Deakins, a batch of deleted scenes, and best of all, the voice-over commentary. This gives us not just Joel and Ethan, but Billy Bob as well, chatting and chortling and clearly enjoying every second of the movie they've made. Their enthusiasm is irresistible. -Philip Kemp
(20 votes)
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