- "Dry cleaning. Was I crazy to be thinking about it?" So ponders the barber, Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton), in one of his many deep-voiced narrative contemplations. As a rule, Ed doesn't say much out loud. Most days, he silently trims hair at the shop where his gabby brother-in-law Frank (Michael Badalucco) is the principal barber. After work, he accompanies his wife Doris (Frances McDormand) to bingo night, shaves her legs, or entertains Big Dave Brewster (James Gandolfini) and his wife Ann (Katherine Borowitz), heiress to the Nirdlinger department store. Of course, Ed himself doesn't do much of the entertaining. He mostly just sits there with a cigarette dangling from his lip, quietly tolerating Big Dave's blustering war stories and Doris' hysterical laughter.
- But then, one day, a rotund fellow named Creighton Tolliver (Jon Polito) shuffles into the barbershop. Tolliver is the sort of guy who wears a wig to get a haircut. Combine that with his twitchy mannerisms and quickly deployed sob story, and you have a character who is absolutely not to be trusted. But he pitches Ed the dry cleaning investment opportunity of a lifetime, and Ed falls for it, hook, line, and sinker. In a hilarious meeting in Tolliver's motel room, the sleazy entrepreneur even makes a femme fatale-style pass at Crane, which Ed staunchly declines. Now Ed just has to find a way to get his hands on some money. Maybe he can transform his suspicions about Big Dave and Doris into access to that famed Nirdlinger fortune.
- As is always the case with these sorts of stories, things quickly begin to unravel. Big Dave hands over the money sure enough, but he confides in Ed that he suspects Tolliver is behind the blackmail scheme. Big Dave arrives more well-informed and angry to their next meeting, and, before long, Doris is set to hang for a murder she certainly didn't commit. Their only hope at trial is an amusingly slick lawyer named Freddy Riedenschneider (Tony Shalhoub) whose legal strategies echo the world-renowned physics theories of "Fritz Something-or-other," namely that "the more you look, the less you really know." By now, the audience should suspect that the more anyone looks, the worse things are going to turn out for Ed. And just when Ed's new life managing the decidedly average musical talents of young Birdy Abundas (Scarlett Johansson) were starting to take off. In his mind, at least.
- First and foremost, The Man Who Wasn't There is an absolutely beautiful film. It contains what is easily some of the best (and most deliberately-paced) black and white cinematography of the past fifty years, making it one of the few neo-noirs to succeed in creating a film that really looks like a classic. Furthermore, it is the most thorough homage to James M. Cain that anyone could imagine, with names from Double Indemnity, piano teachers from Mildred Pierce, and a plot that is a slight variation on The Postman Always Rings Twice. In recently going through the Coen brothers' filmography, however, I now realize that the most impressive aspect of this film may be its silent lead character. After scores of films in which the leads just won't stop yakking, we finally get a taciturn man who feels about the rest of the world the same way I feel about most of the Coens' other characters. There's a lot going on in Ed's head, though, including his final, appropriately tragic hope that maybe he'll meet Doris in the afterlife, where he can tell her the things "they don't have words for here."
- It's difficult to list all of the references in this film, but my favorite is probably that they include the femme fatale's name from both the book (Nirdlinger) and movie (Dietrichson) versions of Double Indemnity. And of course the name Riedenschneider from The Asphalt Jungle.
- Best noir quote: "I was a ghost. I didn't see anyone. No one saw me. I was the barber."
