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Director: | Coen, Joel, Badalucco, Michael, Coen, Ethan, McDormand, Frances, Thornton, Billy Bob |
Studio: | Good Machine |
Writer: | Joel Coen, Ethan Coen |
Rating: | 7.7 (54,186 votes) |
Rated: | R |
Date Added: | 2012-06-05 |
ASIN: | 696306031925 |
Awards: | Nominated for Oscar, Another 23 wins & 32 nominations |
Genre: | English films |
IMDb: | 0243133 |
Duration: | 1:56:00 |
Aspect Ratio: | 1.85 : 1 |
Sound: | DTS |
Languages: | English, Italian, French |
Subtitles: | French, Spanish |
LAC code: | 300007132 |
DVD or VHS: | DVD |
Original: | original |
Coen, Joel, Badalucco, Michael, Coen, Ethan, McDormand, Frances, Thornton, Billy Bob | ... | (Director) |
Joel Coen, Ethan Coen | ... | (Writer) |
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Billy Bob Thornton | ... | Ed Crane | Frances McDormand | ... | Doris Crane | Michael Badalucco | ... | Frank | James Gandolfini | ... | Big Dave Brewster | Katherine Borowitz | ... | Ann Nirdlinger Brewster | Jon Polito | ... | Creighton Tolliver | Scarlett Johansson | ... | Birdy Abundas | Richard Jenkins | ... | Walter Abundas | Tony Shalhoub | ... | Freddy Riedenschneider | Christopher Kriesa | ... | Officer Persky | Brian Haley | ... | Officer Krebs | Jack McGee | ... | P.I. Burns | Gregg Binkley | ... | The New Man | Alan Fudge | ... | Dr. Diedrickson | Lilyan Chauvin | ... | Medium |
Comments: DEN 317
Summary: For all of its late-1940s cold war paranoia, pulp fiction dialogue, and frenzied greed, Joel and Ethan Coen's The Man Who Wasn't There is their most cool and collected film since Blood Simple. An unassuming barber with a scheming wife (Frances McDormand) and a serious smoking habit, Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton) is an onlooker to his own life, a ghostly presence set against a silver-toned film noir backdrop. Only when he decides to alter his fate by blackmailing his wife's lover (James Gandolfini) in order to invest with a traveling salesman (Jon Polito) touting the wave of the future--dry cleaning--do we begin to hear the full extent of Ed's understated, existential lament. As his lawyer (Tony Shalhoub) says in Ed's defense at his eventual trial for murder, "He is modern man." Thornton's deadpan eloquence and cinematographer Roger Deakins's precision lighting offer the perfect counterbalance to the requisite one-liners, plot twists, and false endings that have come to characterize recent Coen brothers films. Almost in spite of the obsessive cultural references (flying saucers, Nabokov's Lolita, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle), Ed Crane steps neatly from the fray as one of cinema's most memorably disenchanted characters. --Fionn Meade
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