The Man Who Wasn't There
Screening: 16 June 2003
USA 2001 Directed by Joel Coen
Leading Players - Billy Bob Thornton, Frances McDormand, James Gandolfini.
Synopsis
In 1949 Santa Rosa, California, laconic chain-smoking small-town barber Ed Crane (Thornton) cuts hair in his in-laws shop. He is married to Doris (McDormand) who is the book-keeper at Nirdlinger's Department Store. She drinks and may be having an affair with her boss Big Dave (Gandolfini).Ed handles this situation, as he handles everything, by smoking. And as he narrates the tale of a man trying to escape a humdrum existence, his story turns from suspected adultery to blackmail to foul play and death in a milieu of Sacramento city slickers, racial slurs, invented war heroics, aliens and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Ed gets wind of a chance to make money in dry cleaning - it's an investment opportunity that could make him more than a man that no one notices.
* * * * * *
Thornton is mesmerising as the disaffected barber in a vintage Coen brothers film that won Joel Coen a share of the Best Director prize at Cannes. A classic film noir full of bad luck and ironic turns of fate, this sumptuous feast of a film is an assured thriller in the style of James M Cain, steeped in the style of movies of the period in which it is set. It is quintessentially American and Thornton's brooding, understated performance as the watchful, cynical Crane has been rated alongside that of Henry Fonda's in The Wrong Man and Gary Cooper's in High Noon.
