After seeing something as visually pleasing as the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There, you have to wonder why more filmmakers don't opt to shoot their projects in black and white.  Some of the most beautiful pictures of the last few years have all been completely colorless, yet also have been generally ignored by the masses for some reason or another.  Some are only partially filmed in black and white (like Pleasantville and those great flashbacks in Memento), some are grainy (Pi), some are quirky (Judy Berlin), some are indescribably gorgeous (Dead Man) and some get the color treatment for their video release (The General, whose colorizing was a bigger crime than any perpetrated by Martin Cahill).

The Man is just straight noir...with a pinch or two of the Coens' zaniness (where else would you find references to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Beethoven, the Roswell spaceship crash and pre-teen oral sex?). Although it contains no references to Hitchcock's similarly set Shadow of Doubt, The Man takes place in late '40s Santa Rosa, California in and around the life of one Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton, Bandits).  Aside from fallen arches, a monotone that could put Ben Stein to sleep and a perpetual cloud of smoke around his head, Ed is absolutely unremarkable in every way. People just don't remember the guy, even if they've recently been introduced to him.

Ed married into a 200-square-foot barbershop with three chairs and a chatty brother-in-law/partner (Michael Badalucco, The Practice) who seems to be an expert on everything.  When he goes home from the hell that is cutting hair, Ed plaintively chain-smokes and stares off into space as he conjures up images of his wife Doris (Frances McDormand, Almost Famous) knocking boots with her boss, "Big Dave" Brewster (James Gandolfini, The Last Castle), the owner of a local department store.  The only comfort Ed finds in his miserable existence can be found in the piano-playing daughter (Scarlett Johansson, Ghost World) of the town lush (Richard Jenkins, Six Feet Under).

One day at the barbershop, Ed meets Creighton Tolliver (Jon Polito, The Tailor of Panama), a loudmouthed, toupee-sporting huckster trying to find marks to invest in a unique business opportunity (called "dry cleaning"). Ed sees the moneymaking enterprise as his way out of a pitiful existence but doesn't have the $10,000 to get Creighton's plan started.  No problem – Ed simply sends Big Dave an anonymous letter threatening to tell everyone about his affair with Doris unless he coughs up the ten big ones.

What follows is never once predictable (thinking the film was over, people started grabbing their coats at 90 minutes, even though there was almost half an hour left), but consistently a wonderfully shadowy marvel.  Ed's adventures include a hysterical sequence involving a high-strung, fast-talking attorney named after the Sam Jaffe character in The Asphalt Jungle (Tony Shalhoub, 13 Ghosts); a car crash and UFO encounter that is reminiscent of the dream sequences in the Coens' The Big Lebowski, which was, like The Man, shot by Roger Deakins (an Oscar nominee last year for the Coens' O Brother, Where Art Thou?); and a scene with Big Dave's wife (Katherine Borowitz), who has a stare no less crazy than Shirley on Ed, delivering a monologue no less strange than The Cowboy's in Mulholland Drive (which, ironically, shared Best Director honors with The Man at Cannes).

Best of all is Thornton's Ed, who looks like Bela Lugosi and narrates The Man like a Jim Thompson pulp novel (the film even has references to "nips," "wops" and "dandies"), and at one point has his voice-over interrupted by a violent outburst, after which he continues on like nothing happened.  And all the while Ed's surroundings, which seem to be constructed only of shiny chrome and ominous shadows, threaten to crush the life out of him (big kudos to production designer Dennis Gassner, an Oscar winner for Bugsy and a nominee for the Coens' Barton Fink).

It's quite remarkable how reminiscent The Man is of the Coens' previous films, most notably Blood Simple, which was heavy on the noir and featured the jealous killing of a wife's secret lover; and Fargo, whose Jerry Lundegaard was another sad sack who married into a dull career and wanted to do away with his wife.  Nobody here meets up with a wood chipper, but even if they did, the black and white blood wouldn't be too frightening.  If anything, Deakins' cinematography would have made it beautiful.

1:56 –

for a scene of violence