THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE (2001) *** The Coen Brothers pretty much always make a statement and here the statement is that there's no way in hell that anyone, ever , made the all-time best film noire without Billy Bob Thornton in it. Seems like a longshot, no they're right. Maybe he was born in the wrong time or we're living in it or whatever, but yeah, they're right. Billy Bob is noire . There's this great determination to declare this film in some manner existentialist-and it it is-but it's not. It's pure noire nasty, there's other stuff pulling around the edges. I guess that the argument is that it's too smart for film noire…um, lookit it. BUT, the pedants will argue, isn't lovely Scarlett Johansson so clearly a metaphor for the lost youth that we could have never attained and are now too frightened to recover? Oh, fuck off, freaks. Everyone in this film is great. It's said more often than it's true, but here it's true.
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