Plus, he's gorgeous.
*******
The Coen Brothers have tried their hands at screwball comedy (The Hudsucker Proxy), mob movie (Miller's Crossing), and neo-noir (Blood Simple). Now they go for retro noir with The Man Who Wasn't There, filmed in gorgeous black and white. Billy Bob Thornton gives an amazing performance as the title character, Ed Crane, whose small-time, get-rich-sorta-quick scheme leads him into a morass of murder and punishment.
Ed knows his wife Doris (Frances McDormand) is cheating on him with her bluff, back-slapping boss, Big Dave (James Gandolfini), so to buy into a business opportunity ("Dry-cleaning!", a phrase which is invoked with the same breathless hope as, "You know -- for kids!" in Hudsucker), he anonymously blackmails Big Dave for the exact amount of money he needs. It's the closest he can bring himself to revenge. Of course, things can't just work out in a movie like this -- Ed can't become rich off a dry-cleaning franchise and scare Big Dave off his wife. Complications ensue and end in murder.
The movie is a conscious, affectionate evocation of James M. Cain pulp fiction like The Postman Always Rings Twice and Out of the Past. The Coens play it perfectly, with a few exceptions (did they really need to bring aliens into it? and what was the deal with the kooky piano instructor?) and film it in an elegant style that would make Billy Wilder proud. They take full advantage of the light and shadow -- and all the symbolism they imply -- offered by black-and-white film. The movie is laced with the Coens' trademark off-beat humor, finely tuned sense of surreality, and obsequious attention to minutiae.
Though Thornton has the role that is paradoxically both the showiest and the subtlest, the supporting cast is solid. Frances McDormand is always wonderful, and Michael Badalucco as her chatterbox brother is fun. I single out Tony Shalhoub for special praise solely because he did not do one of his insufferable "That'sa spicy meat-a-ball!" accents. My boss does bad fake accents all day long; I'll be damned if I want to hear them in a movie, where I go to escape. (My boss has pretty much stopped doing them around me, thanks to my calculated regimen of icy blank stares whenever he does an accent, but I still overhear him using them with other people, which makes me tense up like I'm hearing nails on a blackboard. The latest tactic a coworker of mine has employed is to say to him, straight-faced, "No, that's not how they/he talks." Me, I stand by the icy stare.)
As for Thornton's performance, Owen Gleiberman said it best in Entertainment Weekly: "It takes a very intense actor to seize an audience by appearing to do almost nothing. ... Thornton plays most of his scenes staring straight ahead, without a flicker of obvious emotion, and he murmurs his schemes, defeats, and desires to us in a voice-over narration that puts the dead back in deadpan. Yet it's impossible to take your eyes off him." Thornton is so still, at times, that the ash on his cigarette reaches improbable lengths. From certain angles, his face has a kind of weary, wrecked handsomeness, like Montgomery Clift's after the car accident and years of drugs and drink, that bespeaks his passive, resigned nature. It's really astonishing how subtle his expressions are, how you get the sense of, say, the tenderness he feels for Doris without any noticeable change on his face or in his voice.
The Man Who Wasn't There is a graceful tribute to the classic noirs like Double Indemnity and The Blue Dahlia, and if it inspires you to go dig up some of those old classics and watch or re-watch them, so much the better.
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