The Man Who Wasn´t There

The barber Ed Crane is The Man Who Wasn´t There in the Coen brothers' black-and-white film noir pastiche. He lives a quiet, anonymous middle-class existence with his ambitious and domineering wife Doris, whom he rightly suspects of having an affair with her employer, the self-assured businessman Big Dave. Ed, however, dreams of a different and better life, so he decides to blackmail his wife's lover, who married into his wealth. Without revealing his identity, he threatens to expose the affair to Big Dave's wife unless Big Dave coughs up a hefty sum of money. At first it looks as if everything will go smoothly, but then fickle fate intervenes, and the downward spiral begins in earnest!

The Coen brothers certainly know the film noir genre inside out, yet the film is a disappointment, looking more than anything like a stylistic exercise. The visuals cannot be faulted, but the plot lacks the nerve and passion of the classic film noirs of the 1940s and 1950s. The suspense evaporates fairly quickly in the film, and it is also problematic that the antihero Ed Crane has so little charisma and is so self-effacing that it is hard to empathise with his situation.