The Man Who Wasn’t There is almost the movie that isn’t there. Maybe that’s what the Coen brothers had in mind, a minimalist, sleepwalking, black-and-white bauble with performances that are almost not there and an astringent, rarefied irony. A palate cleanser, perhaps, after the meandering, hit-or-miss stylistic excess, broad comedy, and literary bombast of their last film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? Or maybe it’s their most personal film to date, a confession from the filmmakers who aren’t there, their acknowledgment of being smart-asses who are all show and no tell, except perhaps in Fargo, one of the great American movies of the ’90s. In either case, this is a diverting, occasionally moving, ultimately slight exercise in sly genre bending, dry humor, and occasional insanity. In short, one of the best major releases of a year that really wasn’t there either.

If The Hudsucker Proxy was the Coens’ noir homage to the screwball comedy, this is their screwball answer to noir. The film opens with a descending spiral, a portent of things to come. It’s the barber pole outside a barbershop in 1949 Santa Rosa, California, where Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton) noncommittally cuts hair. Unlike Frank (Michael Badalucco), his brother-in-law, who owns the place, Ed doesn’t talk much, saving it for the film’s hard-boiled voiceover narrative, and Thornton brings to his few lines enough pregnant pauses to shame Jack Webb.

Occasionally, this reserve lifts to offer a glimpse into Ed’s basic horror at existence, as when he stops in the midst of a haircut and reflects on how hair just keeps growing and growing and has to be nudged out his reverie by Frank, who tells him he’s scaring the customer. Utter existential discomfort is evident also in Ed’s appearance, which is more like an absence: no special effect can equal the shock of first seeing the deadpanned, cadaverous Thornton with his crisped gray-white hair and his stark white tunic almost melting into the background, as if in a portrait by Giacometti; the effect is intensified by Roger Deakin’s cinematography (he filmed in color and transferred to black and white for intensified chiaroscuro and luminosity). Ed may not be not-there yet, but he doesn’t have far to go.

Helping him on his way is his wife, Doris (Frances McDormand), a shopworn femme fatale who works as an accountant at Nirdlinger’s Department Store (nobody writing screenplays these days has a way with names like the Coens). Ed suspects she’s having an affair with Big Dave (James Gandolfini), the store’s owner, and when Big Dave shows up with his wife, Ann (Katherine Borowitz), there’s no question about it: Big Dave noisily telling his war stories, Doris laughing too loud, Ann looking on with a stunned annoyance verging on hysteria, Ed smoking in silence. It’s a hilarious, tragic sequence that tells the story of an entire life.

But it’s not enough. So a pseudo–James M. Cain tale ventures to fill in the void. It starts with a chance meeting between Ed and Creighton Tolliver (Jon Polito), an entrepreneur whose business practices are as questionable as his hairpiece and his sexual preferences. Tolliver has a scheme to cash in on the new miracle of dry cleaning, but he needs $10,000 in seed money. Next come the kind of backfiring schemes of blackmail, murder, and retribution that will be familiar to those who enjoyed the ingenious poetic injustices of the Coens’ first film, Blood Simple.

But that narrative can’t stop the picture’s slow drift into nullity either, so the Coens spin out the side story of Birdy Abundas (Scarlett Johansson), the local teenage piano prodigy who is no longer a skinny kid accompanying her dad to the shop. Ed tries to help her fulfill her dreams, or maybe they’re his dreams, but who knows what he’s thinking as he sits there, quietly smoking, while Birdy plays the same slow movement from Beethoven’s PathŽtique Sonata over and over until this story line too skids off the road.

"What kind of man are you?" is the question leveled at Ed more than once by those outraged by his indifference, ineptitude, and infinite melancholy. He doesn’t answer. Neither would the Coen brothers if you asked them what kind of filmmakers they are. I’d say unique, contrived, very funny, and unexpectedly profound. And inconsequential, which might be the entire point.

Issue Date: November 1 - 8, 2001