The Man Who Wasn't There

Set in a sleepy Northern California town in the 1940s, Joel Coen and Ethan Coen 's The Man Who Wasn't There stars Billy Bob Thornton as Ed Crane, a humble barber who suspects his hard-hearted and hard-drinking wife Doris ( Frances McDormand ) of having an affair with her boss ( James Gandolfini ). When a jocular stranger ( Jon Polito ) breezes into town hinting at the fortune to be made investing in an outlandish-sounding new invention called dry cleaning, Ed hatches a blackmail scheme he hopes will make him rich and get him some revenge at the same time. His plan goes horribly awry when he accidentally commits a murder for which Doris ends up being blamed, landing her in the slammer and Ed at the mercy of blowhard big-city lawyer Freddy Riedenschneider ( Tony Shalhoub ). Filmed in black-and-white by three-time Oscar-nominated cinematographer Roger Deakins , The Man Who Wasn't There was inspired by the seedy crime novels of James M. Cain , putting a distinctly Coen brothers' spin on the film noir tradition. Though spiked with their characteristic humor, its moody atmosphere hearkens back to the darker moments of Blood Simple and Fargo — a marked departure from the high-spirited slapstick of O Brother Where Art Thou . — Tom Vick