I watched The Man Who Wasn't There on my own time for our study of film noir. I can't say that I enjoyed it very much, although I did appreciate it. It was definitely a great example of film noir, which is exactly what the Cohen brothers were going for. It was almost humorous because it was like there was a blatant overload of film noir aspects.
First of all, this very recent film was very purposely in black and white. Secondly, there was a good deal of narration throughout the film. There was also the expected shadowy darkness throughout the majority of the film, cigarette smoking, a "suspenseful" plot with many twists, an imperfect lead character, etc. Basically everything we went over in class last night to describe film noir was present in this film! However, I found it to be quite dull and boring. I think that the Cohen brothers were kind of striving for that, so I can appreciate it, but I prefer to have some sort of entertainment when I watch movies!
Billy Bob Thorton did a good job as being the "harmless barber" who got caught in a string of unfortunate events, but there was nothing likeable about his character. I didn't even care when he...well...I don't want to give away the ending! Although I obviously just did...
As I mentioned, I appreciated this film for its use of the film noir style, but I can't say that I found it to be an enjoyable experience. In fact, I'm glad that I got to watch it on my own time so I could "accidentally" miss a few minutes of it while I got food from the kitchen or browsed the internet...
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The Man Who Wasn't There is a quirky neo-noir that finds the Coen brothers delivering a wonderfully wry homage to film noir with Roger Deakins' moody black-and-white cinematography dazzling the eye.
Billy Bob Thornton is Ed Crane, a very dull barber who could care less about the business that he married into, wants more out of life. So he swindles a little money to invest in a dry cleaning business until the plot swings into motion, and nothing goes as planned.
Thornton's pensive yet subtly nuanced facial expressions, which is perhaps the best piece of acting that I've seen him in since sling blade.
Not to mention he has the most subtly expressive film noir face to smoke a dangling cigarette since Humphrey Bogart.
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