The Man Who Wasn't There

Joel and Ethan Coen's The Man Who Wasn't There opens in Santa Rosa, California, in the summer of 1949, where Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton) cuts hair in a shop owned by his brother-in-law Frank (Michael Badalucco). Ed is a quiet man, almost invisible, and he narrates his own story with a flat, weary voice that matches the black-and-white photography by Roger Deakins. The film is a crime drama in the key of film noir, but the Coens slow the tempo down, letting the smoke from Ed's cigarettes and the hum of the barbershop set the rhythm. Ed's wife Doris (Frances McDormand) works as a bookkeeper at a department store called Nirdlinger's, and she is having an affair with her boss, Big Dave Brewster (James Gandolfini). When a slick stranger named Creighton Tolliver (Jon Polito) pitches Ed on a dry-cleaning venture that needs ten thousand dollars to get off the ground, Ed sees a way out of his rut. He decides to get the money by anonymously blackmailing Big Dave about the affair. The scheme is simple, or so it seems, but it sets off a chain of events that Ed cannot control.

The Coens wrote and produced the film through Mike Zoss Productions with Working Title and USA Films. It cost about $20 million and brought in just under $19 million at the box office, a modest return that did not match the strong critical notices. The cast includes Katherine Borowitz as Ann Nirdlinger Brewster and features a young Scarlett Johansson as a teenage piano prodigy named Birdy Abundas. Carter Burwell's score, built around solo piano and sparse strings, gives the film a melancholy pulse. The movie earned a 7.5 rating from users and holds up as one of the Coens' most controlled exercises in style and fatalism.

What sets the film apart from the Coens' other crime pictures is its refusal to hurry. The blackmail plot is almost incidental to the film's real subject: a man who has spent his life watching rather than living. Roger Deakins shot the film in color and then converted it to black-and-white in post-production, a process that let him control contrast in ways impossible with black-and-white film stock. The result is one of the most visually striking films in the Coens' catalog, a monochrome world of deep shadows and cigarette smoke that feels both period-authentic and strangely timeless. [edit]

Ed Crane cuts hair in a Santa Rosa barbershop owned by his brother-in-law Frank, a genial blowhard who talks endlessly while Ed works in near-silence. Ed narrates his own story in a flat, weary voice-over, describing himself as a man with fallen arches and a life that has simply happened to him. He is married to Doris, a bookkeeper at the local department store Nirdlinger's. The marriage is arid; Ed suspects, correctly, that Doris is having an affair with her boss, Big Dave Brewster, a blustering, self-satisfied man who presents himself as a war hero and a pillar of the community.

Into this stagnant life walks Creighton Tolliver, a fast-talking stranger with a proposition: a dry-cleaning business, the wave of the future, that needs ten thousand dollars to get off the ground. Ed, who has no money and no obvious desire to change his life, nevertheless sees in the venture a possible exit from his rut. Rather than ask anyone for the money, he decides to get it by anonymously blackmailing Big Dave over the affair. The scheme is, on its face, simple, a letter, a demand, a payoff, and Ed executes it with the same deadpan competence he brings to cutting hair.

The blackmail sets off a chain of events that Ed cannot control, and the film's middle act follows the consequences as they ripple outward: a confrontation that goes catastrophically wrong, a death that Ed must account for, and the slow, grinding machinery of a small-town police investigation and, eventually, the courts. Doris is drawn into the mess in ways she does not understand, and Ed finds himself navigating lawyers, insurance men, and a private investigator with the same flat affect he brings to everything else. A young Scarlett Johansson appears as Birdy Abundas, a teenage piano prodigy whose family Ed befriends; her ambitions and her father Walter's hopes become a melancholy subplot about talent, delusion, and the impossibility of escape. Tony Shalhoub arrives late as Freddy Riedenschneider, a hotshot defense attorney from Sacramento whose cynical patter about reasonable doubt becomes one of the film's comic and philosophical centerpieces. The story builds toward a courtroom reckoning and a series of revelations about who did what, and to whom, and, in classic Coen fashion, about how little any of it changes Ed Crane.

The film is a crime drama in the key of film noir, but the Coens slow the tempo way down, letting cigarette smoke, the hum of the barbershop, and Carter Burwell's solo-piano score set the rhythm. It is less a thriller than a study in fatalism, passivity, and the American postwar dream gone gray.[edit]