THE BIG SWEEP THE COENS CAST ASIDE FILM RULES TO MAKE A BLACK-AND-WHITE FILM NOIR.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

Leave it to filmmaking siblings Joel and Ethan Coen to follow their hyperactively overstuffed surprise hit ``O Brother, Where Art Thou?'' with a movie purposely drained of color, excitement and even most of its central character.

``The Man Who Wasn't There'' looks like a film noir from the year it's set in, 1949, and does indeed contain a couple of killings, some tricky obsessions and guilt-transferrals, existential dread and other hallmarks of that perverse and beloved postwar film cycle.

But it's pretty safe to say that none of those classic crime dramas featured a barber ... and a guy who can just barely hold his end of a simple conversation, at that.

The unkindest cut

Billy Bob Thornton stars as Ed, a man so passive that it's taken him many years to even realize that he's dissatisfied working the second chair at his brother-in-law's Santa Rosa haircutting shop. Ed's wife, Doris (Frances McDormand, whom husband Joel Coen directed her to a best actress Oscar in ``Fargo''), is Ed's ambitious, um, accountant wife; she can be a nasty drunk and is secretly having an affair with Big Dave (James Gandolfini), the married manager at the department store where she keeps the books.

But Doris is no one's idea of a classic femme fatale, just as the utterly unassertive Ed is hardly your average, hard-boiled noir protagonist. But when he makes one false move to try to better his life, Ed brings astonishing, ironic disaster down on all around him - but again, unlike in such frenetic Coen productions as ``Brother,'' ``The Big Lebowski'' and ``Raising Arizona,'' the multifaceted tragedies unfold at such a deliberate pace it often seems like nothing is happening at all.

According to Joel Coen, who takes director credit on all of the brothers' films, although it's long been acknowledged that he co-writes, co-directs and co-produces all of the pictures with Ethan, the subdued approach to ``The Man Who Wasn't There'' stems from the movie's main inspiration: the novels of pulp writer James M. Cain, if not necessarily the films (``Double Indemnity,'' ``The Postman Always Rings Twice'') that were made from them during the high noir period.

``Cain's novels are actually kind of unusual in the terms of that genre,'' Coen notes, ``because they dealt not with criminals but with ordinary people who found themselves in criminal situations. He was very interested in what ordinary people did, day-to-day, for a living. They worked in the insurance business or the restaurant business or a bank or sang opera. We sort of carried that idea into this movie; what might a guy who goes to the barber shop every day find himself involved in?''

But in typical Coen fashion, that everyday quality of Cain's books was aestheticized to an extreme in the conceptualization of Ed. His everyday work routines are, essentially, his life, since his passive personality prevents him from doing much of anything with anybody he isn't standing behind with a comb and scissors.

A little off the top

For Thornton, whose acting work has been marked by attention-getting characterizations in such films as ``Sling Blade,'' ``A Simple Plan'' and the current caper comedy ``Bandits,'' the opportunity for sustained, disciplined underplaying was a challenge to be savored.

``I loved playing this part, loved it so much, I can't tell ya,'' the naturally exuberant Arkansan tells us anyway. ``There are a lot of directors who wouldn't be confident enough to do a movie like this to start with, let alone have the lead character be a guy who can't even relate to people.''

Joel Coen reckoned that that shoe fit more on the actor's foot.

``The danger with a character like this, who says very little and is basically reactive, is that, if you're not very, very secure and self-confident as an actor, you get nervous,'' the filmmaker says. ``You feel like you have to do something to get across who the character is. You feel like you have to fill in the void; otherwise you're going to disappear and become not only a cipher as a character, but sort of a cipher on screen in terms of not holding the cinematic space. So the trick was to get somebody who was competent enough and understood the part well enough not to have to embellish it.''

It may not sound like it, but that's extremely painstaking work.

``To make monotony interesting is a hard thing to do,'' Thornton confirms. ``This is the hardest part I've ever played, but I just had to make sure I was thinking all of the time, had to make sure that there wasn't a moment in the movie when I wasn't alive and having some sense of wonder.''

``It's not the kind of part that's always noticed,'' the actor adds. ``Usually, it's the person that's screamin' and yellin' and cryin' and whatever. What's hard about this, though, is that you've got to toe the line. You can never go outside that.''

Stark contrast

``I did say to Billy Bob at the end of the shoot, 'I would love to work with you someday,' '' cracks McDormand, who says her main co-star was the knowledge that everything she did would ultimately be seen in black-and-white. ``I think we were all black-and-white challenged - none of us had worked in it before - and it became a character in the movie. I don't know what came first with these guys, the story or the idea that it was black-and-white; but as an actor, you just have to do so much less.

``It's interesting; I know that Joel and Ethan chose to do fewer close-ups after the first couple of weeks,'' McDormand adds. ``That's because the brightest light source in an actor's face is the whites of their eyes, so if they blink in a black-and-white film it becomes portentous; it's not just blinking their eyes.''

Although director of photography Roger Deakins, who has shot all of the Coens' movies since ``Barton Fink'' a decade ago, has had some black-and-white experience, this was his first full-length monochrome feature.

And like all Coen films, it had to look like no other. After much experimenting, Deakins and the brothers decided to shoot ``Man Who Wasn't There'' on mid-speed, fine-grain color negative, then print on a higher contrast black-and-white stock more commonly used for movie title crawls.

There were several reasons for this decision, some more practical than aesthetic.

``Because black-and-white movies haven't been made for the last 40 years in any number, they haven't developed black-and-white film stocks like they have color stocks,'' Coen explains. ``There are no fast, fine-grain black-and-white stocks to shoot on, meaning that you need lots of light fixtures and there are limits to the low-light conditions that you can shoot in.''

Plus, there's the standard contractual arrangement with ancillary finance partners, such as DVD and video distributors, that require the availability of color master prints.

But all those and other noncinematic considerations aside, the shooting method ``Man Who Wasn't There'' employed gave Deakins a richness of grey tones to fiddle with, as well as a wider selection of lighting possibilities than even some of the monochrome masters of the 1940s may have enjoyed.

``It obviously harkens back to old movies, but at the same time it's a contemporary movie,'' Deakins says of ``Man Who Wasn't There's'' visual plan. ``The thing that I felt was so great about the story was that it had so many different moods and took off in so many different, subtle directions; that was a great opportunity to do a lot of different lighting styles that actually would all mesh together.''

This included starkly sculpted lightscapes, but there are also extended stretches of the film during which the photography does not call attention to itself at all. This was a big part of the aesthetic plan, too.

Close shave

``If you had gone too much with a classic noir look, it really wouldn't have fit with the story,'' Deakins explains. ``It's actually a small film about the workings of this guy's mind. There's no point doing great lighting effects if they don't fit. The lighting develops around what pertains to each sequence.

``If anything about the photography works, it's because it's part of the piece,'' Deakins adds. ``The film's strength is that everything fits together; nothing seems out of place, whether it's the costumes or the design or the music or the photography. I think, in a way, you've failed if people say, 'I loved the photography.' But I think if we were successful, it was in the simplicity of the images. That's what's really striking. Sometimes, there's just nothing in frame but tones of grey and a face, and that kind of creates more memorable imagery than black and white films that use a lot of texture in the frame.''

Whether or not ``The Man Who Wasn't There's'' careful craftsmanship is appreciated by movie audiences conditioned to sledgehammer stimulation in full, prettifying color remains, of course, to be seen.

``Movie exhibitors, in particular, are very leery of black-and-white,'' Coen acknowledges. ``I think there's a base-level fear that audiences aren't going to see something that they're not used to. But sometimes, if you want to do something like this, it's the very thing that's different about it that can be used to get people interested in seeing the movie.

``I think there are enough people out there that are curious about what can be done in black-and-white now, especially if it's being used in a conscious and deliberate way,'' Coen concludes. ``I don't think anyone who watches this movie is going to feel like they've been cheated out of some element of their moviegoing experience because it's in black-and-white. It's different, but it's beautiful.''

CAPTION(S):

7 photos

Photo:

(1 -- 4 -- cover -- color) The stars of ``The Man Who Wasn't There,'' clockwise from top left: James Gandolfini, Billy Bob Thorton, Frances McDormand and Tony Shalboub

(5) Joel, left, and Ethan Coen take a bold step into cinema's past, filming their latest, ``The Man Who Wasn't There,'' in black and white.

(6) Billy Bob Thornton stars as a barber whose life makes him invisible in the Coens' ``Man Who Wasn't There.''

(7) Billy Bob Thorton, left, shares a scene with James Gandolfini in ``The Man Who Wasn't There''