With The Man Who Wasn't There the Coen brothers--those ironic geniuses of left-field bizarre--have pulled off another side-swerve into the unexpected. A movie "about a hairdresser who wants to become a dry-cleaner" as the brothers gleefully claim to have pitched it, it's set in 1949 in the small Northern California town of Santa Rosa (venue for Hitchcock's 1943 classic Shadow of a Doubt) and filmed in lustrous, deep-shadowy black-and-white--an affectionate, though never slavish, tribute to the great era of film noir. Not only in its austere monochrome but in its tone, it comes as a total contrast to the Coens' previous film, the cheerfully picaresque O Brother, Where Art Thou?.
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