Page One

“The Man Who Wasn’t There,” the latest movie from the consistently inventive Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, takes place in 1949 Santa Rosa and was filmed in the California towns of Orange and Pasadena.  

Stylistically combining the vernacular humor of Ring Lardner with the hardboiled crime dramas of James M. Cain, this film goes so deep into the American vein, its real location, however, is Anywhere, U.S.A. When a story begins in a small-town barber’s chair and ends in an electric chair, could it be set anyplace else? 

Film noir lovers will be well pleased by the plot’s twists and turns, its meticulous attention to the vagaries of infidelity, blackmail, and murder. But I’m not much of a noir fan, and to paraphrase a character in the film, recounting the plot will just make your head hurt.  

There are two things that set this movie apart and make it unique in American cinema. One is the creation of its central character, the barber Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton).  

A pained, laconic man, Crane is perhaps the most passive, nonviolent criminal in cinema history. He isn’t motivated by lust or greed. He even finds it difficult to cut hair and throw it away like common dirt, appreciative as he is that the stuff grows out of us and is part of us. Crane floats through the world ghostlike, a sexless nonentity, yet he has a rich interior life filled with reflection and rumination, which eloquently pours out of him and into the film’s narration, if not his fellow characters’ ears.  

The other element that makes “The Man Who Wasn’t There” a singular creation is the film’s elegiac tone. This mood of a loving lamentation does not come from Mr. Crane – he has no point of view – it belongs, rather, to the filmmakers. They tug at your heart not because they want you to experience the tragedy of loss, but because they want you to accept loss and recognize its beauty. The Coen brothers are moving in the realm of poetry in this regard.  

Watching this film, I thought less about comparisons to “Double Indemnity” and more about the way Thom Gunn versified AIDS or the way Donald Hall rendered divorce and cancer. The Coen brothers make their poetry with a soundtrack of Beethoven sonatas and an exquisite black and white cinematography that turns stark for interiors and creamy for exteriors. 

Thornton’s career hits a high-water mark with his performance. It’s no small task to make riveting a man with no pulse, especially when the character is in almost every frame, but Thornton does so with astonishing success. Some of the advance praise for “The Man Who Wasn’t There” has compared his work here to that of the great Montgomery Clift, and indeed Thornton’s haunted expressions do sometimes evoke the master’s, especially regarding “A Place in the Sun.” At the risk of sounding flip, however, I was also reminded of late-period Rory Calhoun, around the time of “Mulefeathers” and “Motel Hell.” 

Thornton’s towering performance stands tall due to the equally astonishing performances of his supporting cast. Frances McDormand (collaborating with her director husband, Joel Coen, for the first time since “Fargo”) plays Crane’s cheating spouse, Doris. Hardly a villain, Doris is by and large the placid type, and she and Ed make a good couple. But unlike Ed, Doris gets power surges that cause her to drink and grab life by the balls. One minute she’s as stone-faced as her husband and the two looking like matching gargoyles, but then on an impulse, her eyes spin and her face breaks out in a big twitch. She needs adventure. She loves her husband, but she lusts for life. 

McDormand is an abundantly talented actor and she makes her character so hard and funny, so soft and sad, you can see why Ed doesn’t hate her even though she’s a cheat. Other notable performances are turned in by the brutish James Gandolfini, as Big Dave, Doris’s lover; by Jon Polito, as Creighton Tolliver, the “pansy” grifter who inadvertently sets the plot in motion; and by Scarlett Johansson in the role of Birdy Abundas, the teenage pianist whose youth and music represent the barber’s last hope at stopping life from going down the drain.  

It’s interesting to note that “The Man Who Wasn’t There” began its release on All Souls’ Day, the second of the Mexican Days of the Dead. Could a movie that accepts and even celebrates loss have a better launch date than a holiday that does the same?