The Man Who Wasn't There Release Date: October 25, 2001 Starring: Billy Bob Thornton, Frances McDormand, James Gandolfini Directed by: Joel Coen
Three movies after Fargo, which won brothers Joel and Ethan Coen several Oscar nods and some mainstream credibility, the boys, God bless them, are continuing to not give a damn about said mainstream cred. Not only are they cussedly staying their weird-ass selves, they’re getting better at it. After the ineffable The Big Lebowski and the wicked O Brother, Where Art Thou?, they now offer the most engrossingly eccentric American movie of the year (barring, of course, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive), the beautifully bizarre The Man Who Wasn’t There. Shot in gorgeous, silvery black and white by their longtime cinematographer, Roger Deakins, Man has a theme similar to the Coens’ 1991 Barton Fink, which, admittedly, is hard to define quickly itself. Let’s just say that while the all-over-the-place Fink was about a hack who got mistaken for a genius and was then forced to do hack work, The Man Who Wasn’t There is about a cipher who could be mistaken for an enigma. Billy Bob Thornton plays Ed, a laconic barber who, for one moment, decides to go against the pattern of his life and actually do something (something that, amusingly enough, involves dry cleaning), whereupon he pretty much unleashes all the forces of hell. As a screen presence, Thornton is very much there; his seemingly minimal performance, involving a perpetually worried look and an ever-burning cigarette, is about as good as movie acting gets. Playing the more voluble characters around him in a widening web of adultery, blackmail, murder, and UFOs (yes, UFOs), Frances McDormand, Jon Polito, Scarlett Johansson, and James Gandolfini all make indelible impressions. The Coens walk a tightrope in this movie—there are moments when its absurdist humor could easily have plunged into nihilism. As always, their moviemaking skills dazzle, but in this case, it’s their cast that gets them safely to the other end of the tightrope.
