The Man Who Wasn't There
by Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Billy Bob Thornton, Frances McDormand, James Gandolfini, Katherine Borowitz, Michael BadaluccoDirector: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language); French (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 116 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-10-01
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Universal Studios
Movie Reviews of The Man Who Wasn't There
Movie Review: The Coen Brothers' finest work.
Summary: 5 Stars
The Man Who Wasn't There takes patience, a slow, dry movie that deftly and almost subtly takes the Coens' two styles (broad comedy and twisty, cause-and-effect crime drama) and blends them into a single piece of filmmaking. Where else are you going to get a pitch-perfect film noir, goofy alien subplots, such darkly ironic twists amongst discussion of dry cleaning and hairstyles?
Billy Bob Thornton inhabits the character of Ed Crane in a way that weighs down on his shoulders, dampens his mood, blanks his face. His "friend", Big Dave (James Gandolfini) tries to engage and amuse Ed, but Ed has already realized his wife may be having an affair with Dave. Ed smokes, stares out into the great unknown, and decides to blackmail Dave.
The results of this action are varying and intricate. If you put them side by side, they might look strange and baffling, but in the course of the movie, they make sense. In a movie full of highlights, it's hard to pick just one, but if I had to, I'd name Freddy Riedenschneider (Tony Shalhoub), a lawyer who talks a lot, mainly to himself. The cinematography is also beautiful -- glorious, evocative black and white that perfectly embodies the film's main character.
The Man Who Wasn't There is an acquired taste. Only after seeing all of The Coen Brothers' movies can I say it is my favorite, because it almost stands outside itself as a comment on their style. It's alive, yet unrealistic, dark yet funny, truthful, yet inescapably cinematic. It's the reason I love the Coen Brothers, and the reason I watch movies.
Summary of The Man Who Wasn't There
For all of its late-1940s cold war paranoia, pulp fiction dialogue, and frenzied greed, Joel and Ethan Coen's The Man Who Wasn't There is their most cool and collected film since Blood Simple. An unassuming barber with a scheming wife (Frances McDormand) and a serious smoking habit, Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton) is an onlooker to his own life, a ghostly presence set against a silver-toned film noir backdrop. Only when he decides to alter his fate by blackmailing his wife's lover (James Gandolfini) in order to invest with a traveling salesman (Jon Polito) touting the wave of the future--dry cleaning--do we begin to hear the full extent of Ed's understated, existential lament. As his lawyer (Tony Shalhoub) says in Ed's defense at his eventual trial for murder, "He is modern man." Thornton's deadpan eloquence and cinematographer Roger Deakins's precision lighting offer the perfect counterbalance to the requisite one-liners, plot twists, and false endings that have come to characterize recent Coen brothers films. Almost in spite of the obsessive cultural references (flying saucers, Nabokov's Lolita, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle), Ed Crane steps neatly from the fray as one of cinema's most memorably disenchanted characters. --Fionn MeadeComedy DVD Video
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