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Feb 13, 2026 Web Exclusive By Iris Chen Photography by The Criterion Collection

Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton), the titular man of the Coen Brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), is a barber—second chair. At a critical moment later in the film he is singled out as “a modern man,” a phrase, which given his cookie-cutter Codding home, his plain-spoken wife Doris (Frances McDormand), his pig-riding, pie-eating brother-in-law Frank (Michael Badalucco) and the weekends they all spend together dancing at the shopping complex’s social functions, one should take to mean: He is completely ordinary.

Yet it is the Coen Brothers’ great insight in this film that it takes an extraordinary amount of effort to be ordinary (as they say in the Criterion Collection edition’s extras: “It’s all just normal, but that’s weird”). The film is set in 1949; Santa Rosa, California. Doris tries hard at her bookkeeping job and forces herself to go to the county fair even though, in both cases, she needs to take the edge off with a drink. Creighton Tolliver (Jon Polito), another example, is bald but wears a fake hairpiece to hide the fact. After a time, the effort they both spend maintaining ordinary appearances becomes the way that they live. The appearances go all the way down. Yet still, Tolliver goes into Ed’s shop to get his sideburns trimmed. Both must be maintained; it is unclear which is more real.

After Ed suspects that Doris is cheating, the film slides into a more suspenseful register, and neo-noir tropes appear. There are homicides, corruption, confessions, sham business ventures, and an extended courtroom scene. There are also softer notes: Ed listens to a Beethoven piano sonata and loses himself a little. He makes a confession about his marriage and Doris really looks into his eyes. At each moment, there is a sense that perhaps within the liminal, lawless spaces that often follow a seismic event, they will find it within themselves to change their lives. But Ed’s laconic voiceover papers over the melodrama and brings us into the next scene. He moves life along at the regular pace of the grocery checkout line, charting its greater arc without always stopping to smell the flowers, as it were.

Joel Coen has said: “the movie is so much about Billy Bob Thornton’s character [Ed].” What makes him singular—indeed modern—is how he rises above the life that he lives. Though that life is the same as everybody else’s (we can always count on him to be there at the barbershop the next morning) he is aware of the small tragedies that are built into it, whereas the rest of us live through them more or less unaware.

The Coen Brothers made eight films before The Man Who Wasn’t There. According to McDormand, star of many Coen Brothers works (who also happens to be married to Joel Coen), this is their most personal. Joel Coen won the Best Director award for the film at that year’s Cannes. Roger Deakins was nominated for an Academy Award for the film’s cinematography. However, despite its critical success, Thornton recalls that the film “was largely ignored in the United States because it is in black and white.” In the extra material that comes with this Criterion Collection edition, which includes an interview between the Coen Brothers and Megan Abbott, an archival interview with Deakins, short documentaries of the making of the film, one deleted scene, as well as an essay by Laura Lippman, one will hear every single member of the cast praise that aesthetic choice. This 4K restoration makes it that much more beautiful to watch.

(www.criterion.com/films/34563-the-man-who-wasn-t-there)