Grade: A-

Verdict: The Coen's have made yet another great flick.

Details:
• Starring Billy Bob Thornton, Frances McDormand, James Gandolfini
• Directed by Joel Coen
• Rated R for violence

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Review: By building a movie around a character that even the title admits isn't there, the Coen brothers challenge us to find our own way into their melancholy noir "The Man Who Wasn't There." The protagonist has the personality of an X-ray, the other characters drop like flies, and there we are, looking around for a guide, forsaken inside the film's cold black-and-white world. That's the point. Apt pupils of film noir, Joel and Ethan Coen want viewers to feel as lost and alienated as their doomed antihero. Despite generous bone-dry humor, this is not a feel-good picture.

The Coens, those scamps, don't make it easy. Their brooding loser is a barber named Ed, who's played like a block of slowly crumbling granite by Billy Bob Thornton. He's so implacably stolid, a man of blunt edges and imposing stoicism, that it's not clear whether his heart is pumping blood or ice slush. His wife meets tragedy. How does it make him feel? "Like I was a ghost walking down the street." That's major emoting for Ed.

Action is stripped away to clear the way for psychological observation. Within the familiar maze of noir curlicues -- infidelity, blackmail, murder -- emerges a character study of glacial meticulousness. Ed is more complicated and spiritually alert than he looks (he looks anesthetized). As he tumbles into a tailspin of trouble, it becomes clear that he's a wounded soul who uses dispassion as an armor against the world. Wronged once too often, he's tattooed with boot prints and tire tracks.

It's 1949 in the Arcadian village of Santa Rosa, Calif. -- where, incidentally, Hitchcock's suburban noir "Shadow of a Doubt" took place. Cutting hair in his brother-in-law's barbershop, Ed isn't terribly flustered that his wife, Doris (the brilliant Frances McDormand), is cuckolding him with neighbor friend Dave ("The Sopranos' " James Gandolfini). "It's a free country," Ed says in parched voice-over, a noir device as telltale as Roger Deakins' mood- enriching black-and-white photography.

In fact, Ed wants to parlay his misfortune into cash. He needs $10,000 to invest in a shady dry-cleaning scheme (which will dry him clean). So he sends Dave an anonymous note demanding $10,000 or his marriage, business and reputation will be mud.

It's axiomatic that blackmail is a passport to disaster. Someone is accidentally killed, and Doris, who I can tell you right now didn't do it, is charged with murder.

For a passive guy, Ed sets off quite a chain of calamity. He's the classic existential stumblebum. Every move is a mistake, which may be why he so rarely moves. Noir antiheroes by definition are fatalists, so there's not much he can do. Even a well-meaning grope at redemption involving Scarlett Johansson's nubile teen pianist proves hopelessly misguided. Barbers are in the business of clipping away other people's messes, not creating them. Fate can be comically cruel.

"The Man Who Wasn't There" lands amid a rash of smart neo-noirs: "Memento," "The Deep End," "Joy Ride" and "Mulholland Drive." The Coen brothers -- the duo writes and produces; Joel directs -- plunge into the tradition with typical brio. Their body of work is a serial homage to cherished Hollywood genres. Last year's frenetic "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" bowed to chain-gang pictures, among others. "The Hudsucker Proxy" was an ode to screwball.

This is their fifth return to noir, a love affair they commenced with "Blood Simple" and have carried through "Miller's Crossing," "Barton Fink" and "Fargo."

But "Man" marks their fullest commitment to classical noir ingredients, most conspicuously in Deakins' camera work, which should be more impressive than it is. The best noir cinematographers -- John Alton, James Wong Howe -- extracted deep psychological meaning from shadow-shaped compositions. Lustrous chiaroscuro telegraphed as much danger and anxiety as a situation.

"Man," instead, looks like a modern film shot in black and white. (It was shot in color, then processed in black and white.) The contrasts are watery, dulled by washed whites. Deakins seldom exploits the manipulative possibilities of the medium. The prevailing gray palette seems mostly to serve the ashen blankness of Ed.

Joel Coen's gift for teasing out the quirks and eccentricities in actors pays off with expertly idiosyncratic turns from the entire cast. McDormand's brief appearance is a masterpiece of scrupulous comic detail.

But our eyes are stuck on Thornton through this slow-going tragedy. Thornton creates a succinct profile of a guy who's "guilty of living in a world that had no place for me." Ingeniously, we don't see the full stature of the man who wasn't there until the end, at which point the Coens display a rare glint of compassion. As Ed's story closes irislike, he's suddenly there.

— Chris Garcia, Austin American-Statesman Film Critic