The Man Who Wasn’t There

The greatest noirs function in perfect ambiguity: the very nature of how they’re shot begs the viewer to look closer and yet the answers waiting to be found in the darkness almost never resolve neatly enough to satisfy the human urge to make order out of chaos. Characters in noirs are the closest modern examples of Classical Greek tragedy figures – they know not why they do what they do, but they are compelled upon a path of destruction that they meet head-on with a grim acceptance. At its core, Noir is about the twists and turns of cruel indifferent fate, and the people that double-cross each other thinking they can change that ending to suit their selfish desires.

The Man Who Wasn’t There plays with all the conventions of noir – the characters that surround Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton, in a stolid performance that presages his wonderful turn in the first season of FX’s Fargo) all have questions for him but Crane is not the man who can provide satisfactory answers. He outlines an actual murder plot, staying true to every sad miserable detail, and yet his lawyer refuses to believe him because the facts don’t make for a fascinating story. Perhaps the most revealing idea the film offers occurs when the lawyer says that the closer you look at something, the less it makes sense. To be able to comprehend a problem, one would have to look at it out of the corner of their eye – to look directly at the subject is to look into the void.

This thesis lies at the heart of The Man Who Wasn’t There, and reveals the Coens’ feelings towards the noir genre: the best noirs are incomprehensible in plot; the real importance of a good noir lies in the way that the film is presented (Roger Deakins’ cinematography here is the film’s greatest asset) and in the feelings that that the composition of the film stirs up in each viewer. In this way, The Man Who Wasn’t There enters the pantheon of great noirs while also functioning as a treatise on what makes a good noir tick.

The film is slow like the burning of the cigarette almost always tucked beneath Ed Crane’s upper lip, and functions all the better for its sense of time and place – staying in the Coens’ cinematic worlds is better than any alternative.