Entertainment

Billy Bob Thornton Was Near-Perfect in This Retro Neo-Noir Gem From the Coen Brothers

Published

on

Joel and Ethan Coen are responsible for so many all-time great classics that it’s easy to take them for granted. While most cinephiles are familiar with the brutal neo-Western No Country For Old Men, the darkly comedic mystery Fargo, the cult classic The Big Lebowski, and the soulful music drama Inside Llewyn Davis, some of their best films have fallen under the radar, including The Man Who Wasn’t There.

While not a direct remake, The Man Who Wasn’t There is an homage to the film noir movement of the 1940s, and shares many tonal and stylistic similarities with classics like Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and many thrillers directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Although the aesthetics alone make it worthy of a recommendation, The Man Who Wasn’t There ranks among the Coens’ best thanks to the amazing performance by Billy Bob Thornton.

Advertisement

What Is ‘The Man Who Wasn’t There’ About?

Set a few years after the conclusion of World War II, The Man Who Wasn’t There stars Thornton as the lowly barber Ed Crane, who works in a shop that is owned by his older brother, Frank (Michael Badalucco). After suspecting that his wife Doris (Frances McDormand) is secretly having an affair with his boss, Big Dave (James Gandolfini), Ed decides to stage a blackmail scheme. What he does not anticipate is that Big Dave will end up embezzling funds from a department store in order to pay off the blackmail, and ends up beating to death the businessman Creighton Tolliver (Joe Polito) after he reveals Ed’s involvement. Ed has no option but to kill Big Dave in self-defense, in what becomes the first in a series of crimes he commits to divert attention away from his insidious scheme.

There’s a clever double meaning to the title of The Man Who Wasn’t There as it relates to Ed; while it suggests that he is able to perform a nefarious scheme without anyone noticing, it also suggests that he was so anonymous in the way that he conducted his life that virtually no one paid attention to what he was actually doing. Extra-marital affairs are common plot devices within noir films, but The Man Who Wasn’t There subverts expectations of the genre by turning the “wronged” party into the protagonist of the story. While there isn’t much suggestion that there’s been any real affection between Ed and Dorris for quite some time, it’s implied that his anger towards Big Dave is one that involves ego. Ed has grown so irritated by how Big Dave acts callously without ever facing a consequence that he takes it upon himself to take advantage of the situation. What begins as a misguided attempt at justice ends up revealing a dark side of Ed that he becomes more acquainted with as the story continues to get more disturbing.































































Advertisement

Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz
Which Oscar Best Picture
Is Your Perfect Movie?

Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country

Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.

🪜Parasite

Advertisement

🌀Everything Everywhere

☢️Oppenheimer

🐦Birdman

🪙No Country for Old Men

Advertisement

01

Advertisement

What kind of film experience do you actually want?
The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.





02

Advertisement

Which idea grabs you most in a film?
Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?





03

Advertisement

How do you like your story told?
Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.





04

Advertisement

What makes a truly great antagonist?
The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?





05

Advertisement

What do you want from a film’s ending?
The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?





06

Advertisement

Which setting pulls you in most?
Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.





07

Advertisement

What cinematic craft impresses you most?
Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.





08

Advertisement

What kind of main character do you root for?
The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.





09

Advertisement

How do you feel about a film that takes its time?
Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.





10

Advertisement

What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema?
The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?





The Academy Has Decided
Your Perfect Film Is…
Advertisement

Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.

Parasite

Advertisement

You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Advertisement

You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.

Oppenheimer

Advertisement

You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.

Birdman

Advertisement

You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.

No Country for Old Men

Advertisement

You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.

Advertisement

Billy Bob Thornton Is at His Most Ruthless in ‘The Man Who Wasn’t There’

Thornton is able to craft an intriguing anti-hero in The Man Who Wasn’t There, as Ed is undoubtedly a bad guy who is still compelling to watch. The Coens are keen to show that in this era of affluent business and a booming economy, many selfish people are trying to take advantage of their wealth and privilege. It’s easy to sympathize with Ed early on, as he is brilliant at using his enemies’ weaknesses against them to come up with a con. However, Thornton can make Ed into a steadily more terrifying character when it becomes clear that his desire for power cannot simply be cut off.

Thornton is a perfect fit for the Coens’ style of filmmaking, and it’s a shame that he never worked with them again. Thornton was able to embody the blend of social satire, dark humor, and thinly veiled morality that are essential components of the Coens’ filmmaking habits. Thornton likely has high standards of any script he attaches himself to, as he is an Academy Award-winning screenwriter in his own right; thankfully, the Coens were up to the challenge and ended up providing him with one of their greatest characters.

Advertisement


Advertisement

The Man Who Wasn’t There


Release Date

November 16, 2001

Advertisement

Runtime

116 minutes

Director
Advertisement

Joel Coen

Writers

Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

Advertisement


Advertisement

Advertisement


Advertisement

Source link

You must be logged in to post a comment Login

Leave a Reply

Cancel reply

Trending

Exit mobile version