Joel & Ethan Cohen
The man who wasn't there

In the '50s, America managed its mediocre hysteria with system automation. The Cohen brothers have revisited this historical wrinkle, darkening the white on the screen... this "The Man Who Wasn't There," a parable about the dead spots in our lives. Ed Crane thinks instead of speaking, thus preferring interiority to the common sense of conformity. He is a genius of normality within a former green valley, a landscape deprived of innocence, where everything functions so that fear serves. Because fear is balance, it is tension without passion, it is a deaf Beethoven loved by those who understand the motions of their own soul. Ed Crane is an illiterate musician, full of harmony. He feels almost a sense of peace in his deprivation of dreams. He trusts, convinced that America, that peaceful labyrinth, is fulfilling... even when it errs, even when it fries a little barber with the gears of its moral authority. It is difficult to determine if the Cohen brothers have traveled through time or merely observed the antecedents of space, for certain they understood the best measure for that no man's land at the dawn of McCarthyism, choosing noir as their approach. Because noir is honey on storytelling, it is a sort of spiritual film examination, it is the language with which the popular becomes poetry. Furthermore, there is the "Moonlight Sonata" with which Beethoven becomes the language to understand "The Man Who Wasn't There." Also because without it the film would be a representation of life mortally understood, without that comma that grants the infinite. Introspection then guides the symphony of memorabilia, signs of that nerve-stricken time. Thus the flying saucers sound, the tales about the yellow perils, the atomic rumors, the repressed women wrapped in unhappiness, the men fleeing the consensus-chant. All in a consonance of black dissolves, of small episodes lived and sold for five cents before dying. The little philosophical cut of Ed Crane's memories sanctifies the disillusion of the ordinary man, making him oblique to the right way of being Americans in the '50s. Because the insignificant barber, a crowd individual, paraphrasing Poe, emerges from the dense color to fix itself in his black and white made of sadness without tears. Even if for a moment the train seems to whistle, for this American Bellucca, when mute in his task, stirs a hint of rebellion, urging his life's criterion to explain what sense lies in cutting hair, if it is destined to regrow, even to conquer death for an instant more than the soul. But indeed, it is a mere stir where the instinct's alert level rises, and then everything returns to silence. This irreproachability, almost managed by an alien being, nearly shocks, leading Crane to the electric chair; there is no dimension of unusual gesture in his way of understanding displeasure. Infidelity, murder, the death sentence seem not to touch his life's chords. But perhaps it's only the little individual suffering in silence, renouncing sex for goodwill, dreaming of a lost family life, and accepting death in hopes of rediscovering it. Confronted with the unknown beyond, he humanizes and disappears. The impression of having witnessed the saga of an invisible is left with the viewer, suddenly enchanted by these ethereal memories the Cohen brothers replicated on celluloid. And Billy Bob Thornton has penned in this minute barber. Because Ed Crane is us when we do not listen to ourselves and course steadily on our smoke skates in search of the solution. Which is not what we lack, but what we are. And as soon as we forget it, we vanish, ceasing to exist even because, for others, we may never have been there.