The Man Who Wasn't There

I couldn’t get my mind off of her. I knew I should be able to, but there was just something about this dame. Maybe some previews would help me wash the sin away. THE SWEETEST THING–Oh, Cameron Diaz, I love you and I would watch you in just about anything. But come on! This looks like some of the crappiest romantic comedy fodder I’ve seen in a long time. With a just under the radar cast (Thomas Jane, Christina Applegate (yeah, she counts as “under the radar” now) and Selma Blair) if it finds its way into the hit department it could break out some new stars. It does, however, have promise on one hand: Nancy Pimental (ex-writer for South Park and ex-co-host hottie on Win Ben Stein’s Money) wrote it and she’s pretty damn funny. But the preview only shows one really funny part involving some take-out food wrapped in foil in the shape of a swan. Cameron finds it in Christina’s car weeks after it should have been eaten and thrown up (sorry, Cam, but you are getting a little thin, there) and throws it out the window. Chaos ensues.

I dunno. Could be good, but it really looks dumb. But it’s named after a good song. Maybe that’ll help.

Only one new preview? Oh well. No help there. Maybe the main feature will dull the memory.

By now I think everybody and their dog knows exactly what to expect from the Brothers Coen: the unexpected. They hop genres like Dean Martin hopped bars.

They also tend to have a central item that the whole movie is really about. Oh sure, there’s the story and characters and all that jazz, but that’s not what I’,m talking about. I mean that Miller’s Crossing may have been about gangsters and double-crossing, but what it was really about was hats. O Brother was about hair gel. The Big Lebowski was about a rug.

The Man Who Wasn’t There is all about hair. Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton) is a barber who accidentally gets himself mixed up in a film noir plot to get some money out of his wife’s lover.

Ed is not really a happy man, but he doesn’t know any other way, so he’s content. His wife, Doris (Frances McDormand) works at Nirdlinger’s, a local department store, as a bookkeeper. Her lover, Big Dave (James Gandolfini), is the owner because his wife is the old owner’s daughter.

When Ed gets a chance to make some money in dry cleaning from a traveling con man (Coen main-stay Jon Polito–and as far as we know he’s a con man…there is a question), he decides to finally shake up his wife’s affair. (He hasn’t until now because, “Hey, it’s a free country.”) He sends a note to Big Dave to leave $10,000 (the amount that Jon needs to help start up his new business) or he will tell everybody (including himself since the note is anonymous) everything.

But when Big Dave finds out things get really fucked up. Ed kills Dave in self defense (in a scene with some of the best dying sound effects ever, just as I would imagine someone would sound if they were stabbed in the neck) and it just gets worse from there.

This is a great little diversion for the Coen boys. Not up with some of their best work, but even the Coens at their worst is great. The pace is deliberately slow and I think that caught a few people off guard. I heard a woman saying that it was boring and the story was stupid. I nearly asked her if she would have rather seen Harry Potter in the theatre next door.

The cast was awesome with Billy Bob being the natural standout. Even though he’s content with his life you can tell that there’s some pain back there because of some choices left unmade. He never smiles and always has the same sad, confused look on his face. “How did things ever go so far?” you can hear him ask in every frame. In fact, in his voice-overs he does ask this question, but this version of him knows in the end. If only he had just kept cutting hair, which he focuses on whenever things get a little out of hand. Some of Billy Bob’s best acting since Sling Blade.

The rest of the cast was almost as good. Frances, I don’t think, can put in a bad performance. She was as good as always as the sometimes drunk wife who always wants a little more. James was great as slightly less threatening Tony Soprano. Not to say that he’s a one-note performer, but it’s hard to see him in a role outside of his hit tv show. This time, though, he’s almost like a big, laughing teddy bear until he gets double-crossed by someone he thought was his friend. Tony Shalhoub, as a show-boating, fast-talking lawyer, is also great here. In my opinion he’s one of the best character actors of our time, right up there with Steve Buscemi. He doesn’t get much credit, but I keep pulling for him.

And, just to add to the noir feel of the film, it’s all shot in black and white. Beautiful black and white, in fact. I think this movie comes closest to actually looking like an old 40s noir than any film in recent memory.

Pretty cool movie from a pair of genius filmmakers. For fans it’ll be near bliss. It’s no Blood Simple, but it’s still a lot of fun and more intelligent than 85% of the crap out there. For non-fans it’ll be…what am I talking about? Who’s not a fan of the Coen Brothers? They rock and everybody knows it. If you’re a big noir fan (including the books) you might catch some obscure references to earlier stories. I didn’t, but there are a couple under the IMDb’s trivia page for this flick.