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Rating: Sometimes you look up, pause for a moment, and wonder where you've ended up, who you are, and most importantly, what to do. It happens because it's a natural thing. It happens that one moment you're satisfied with yourself, and the next you want to burn everything rather than having to pick up the pieces. It also happens that a silent barber’s assistant, adrift in the course of life, decides to start swimming against the current and transform from just any smoking Adonis to a covert entrepreneur, partner of a violet scoundrel with a scalp paid in installments.
It happens to blackmail, it happens to play dirty, and it happens that you end up badly (especially if you're the protagonist of a Coen Brothers film). It also happens that you don't know your wife very well, and it also happens that you evaporate like the Japs in Nagasaki. Life deals you losing hands—or maybe you didn’t know how to play them—you can't do anything about it, or can you? Does it make sense to challenge the path of things, to knock down the walls of the labyrinth built around us? The closer you look, the less you understand. That's how it is: you go up close to see, and things get thin. It would be better to give up thinking and let your instincts go, take things as they come without too many compliments. It's annoying to work all day with a chattering fat man, but you have a garbage disposal sink, a car, a house, a wife you can have sex with. You're fine, after all, but "fine" is a word, a feeling, that doesn't exist. What does fine mean? You're fine, satisfied, and then a violet scoundrel from Sacramento who came to your shop to have a place dusted off tells you he would only feel good if he managed to open a dry cleaner. He needs ten thousand dollars to feel the good coursing through his veins, he needs a big ten-thousand-dollar man to feel alive, and for you, it's already too late: you're in.
Big Dave, the other talker, the braggart, is screwing your wife, but he's never made a big deal about it, but suddenly you have an ego that’s burning and demanding its money. Perhaps, subtly, your ego just wants revenge. Maybe that's it, maybe it's aliens, maybe it's just a tangent of your life, maybe it's just your life that from the beginning was destined to go to hell. You didn't need to think, you shouldn’t have rebelled. Accidents make you move more slowly, leave you time to think, and thinking is not the right thing, not suitable for a barber's assistant. You should have let it go, Ed. Birdy is cute, she said she wanted to repay you, and she has heart-shaped lips. It cost her nothing. You never talked, and suddenly you decide to talk to ghosts. You look around, search for someone to talk with about how Doris hanged herself, and find no one. You’re a ghost yourself, Ed. Maybe you have always been, Ed, and where you’re going, things will not be any clearer, do not delude yourself. It's like that for everyone. For you, for Big Dave, for Doris, for the violet scoundrel, for the Japs in Nagasaki. You've all gone, Ed. All... evaporated.
"L'uomo che non c'era" (The Man Who Wasn't There), from 2001, is the nightmare of the average man within the American dream. Black from start to finish, it makes you laugh at the characterization of the characters (so surreal as to be very real) and it saddens you because there’s an Ed Crane (an incredible Billy Bob Thornton passive to the core, but who breaks through the screen), shy and insecure, yet capable of erasing his and others' existence with ridiculous ease (a topos of the Coen Brothers in sublime black and white), in each of us.
A film, in short, to watch to look in the mirror, to give up an hour of overtime (assuming they are not de-taxed) rather than another thing (maybe sex), to start wanting to be alive... wanting it is already a great thing.
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