The title is as enigmatic as the film, but that hardly comes as a surprise. Every film the Coen brothers make is as compelling as it is beguiling. The pair's impenetrably black sense of humour occasionally allows a few dappled rays of sun to peek through and they find themselves temporarily welcomed into the commercial fold from the margins of the independent tundra. However, the lush and buoyant shenanigans of last year's O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a world away from the film noir austerity of The Man Who Wasn't There, a masterful and melancholic ode to regret and acceptance.
From the moment the shadows of the opening credits drift across a wall below a Hopper-esque barber's pole you are spellbound. Cinematographer Roger Deakins has bathed every scene in an evocative and sensual glow. By first shooting in colour, he has been able to provide warmth to the traditionally cold look of black and white and the use of chiaroscuro transforms every frame into a thing of beauty. Without meaning, such imagery would be devalued, but when focussed on the troubled life and etched brow of Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton), it adds depth as well as purpose.
Thornton has never been better than as the lugubrious and taciturn Crane who grinds out his days as a barber at his garrulous brother-in-law Frank's (Michael Badalucco) salon. Stuck in a loveless and childless marriage to Doris (the ever resonant Frances McDormand), he seems resigned to his lot, his circumstances guided more by fate and the influence of others than anything he's done himself. "Life has dealt me some bum cards," Crane bemoans in droll noir parlance, "but maybe I haven't played %u2018em right. I don't know. " With his dapper suits, neatly coiffed hair and a cigarette permanently welded to his bottom lip, Thornton resembles a worn out Fred MacMurray. It's an extraordinary and contained performance. His ability to convey everything by doing nothing is one that with any justice should see him in the running for another Oscar.
Even the realisation that Doris is having an affair with her boss, Big Dave Brewster (James Gandolfini), does little to stir anything other than disappointment in Crane and that's just because he doesn't care. It's only when a business opportunity involving the revolutionary new process known as dry cleaning presents itself in the form of the sleazy gay huckster Creighton Tolliver (Jon Politto), that Crane sees it as a chance to take control of his life for the first time while also enabling him to exact revenge on the adulterous couple.
Inevitably things go wrong.
