The Man Who Wasn't There (2001) UK
The Man Who Wasn't There Image Cover
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Director:Joel Coen
Studio:USA Entertainment
Producer:Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Writer:Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Rating:4
Rated:R
Date Added:2007-03-06
Purchased On:2007-06-03
ASIN:B00005JKMG
UPC:0696306031925
Price:$26.98
Awards:Nominated for Oscar. Another 18 wins & 31 nominations
Genre:Neo-Noir
Release:2002-09-30
IMDb:0243133
Duration:116
Aspect Ratio:1.85:1
Sound:Dolby
Languages:English, Italian, French
Subtitles:English, French, Spanish
Features:Black & White
Subtitled
Joel Coen  ...  (Director)
Joel Coen, Ethan Coen  ...  (Writer)
 
Billy Bob Thornton  ...  Ed
James Gandolfini  ...  Big Dave Brewster
Frances McDormand  ...  Doris Crane
Michael Badalucco  ...  Frank
Katherine Borowitz  ...  Ann Nirdlinger Brewster
Jon Polito  ...  Creighton Tolliver
Scarlett Johansson  ...  Birdy Abundas
Richard Jenkins  ...  Walter Abundas
Tony Shalhoub  ...  Freddy Riedenschneider
Christopher Kriesa  ...  Officer Persky
Brian Haley  ...  Officer Krebs
Jack McGee  ...  P.I. Burns
Gregg Binkley  ...  The New Man
Alan Fudge  ...  Dr. Diedrickson
Lilyan Chauvin  ...  Medium
Comments: The last thing on his mind is murder.

Summary: 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 Meade