Of the Coens’ celebrated array of idiosyncratic miracles, “The Man Who Wasn’t There” is probably the most thoughtful, sophisticated, and easiest to misunderstand. Not one, but two viewings were required for me to really make sense of the film, and even now there are bits and pieces that elude me. Still, there is more than enough evidence to call this the best film of the year to date.

The movie is beautiful. The compositions are the densest you’re likely to see, and also the most pleasurable to watch. The black and white is astonishing for the mid levels of gray that are framed in every shot by carefully planted shadows that foreground some characters and conceal others, according to the theme. In the film’s best sequence, the camera tracks Ed Crane, the hero of this little noir film, through an open window as he retrieves an important package from one floor of a hotel, then cranes up to the second floor as Ed climbs the stairs to meet his new business partner, Creighton Tolliver. The shot is uninterrupted, meaning the camera moves from one frame (the window on the first floor) to another (the one on the second), as if you were manually moving a strip of film. It’s a brilliant, self-conscious nod to the filmic quality of Ed’s story, which becomes important later. The shot also puts Ed into perfect silhouette, so he is “blacked out” against the rich grays in the background—he’s the man who wasn’t there, a walking void. There are touches like that in almost every scene: Ed walking through Nirdlinger’s after hours through pools of light, Ed lying on his bed with vertical lines flickering over him as if he were a phantom, Ed silhouetted against Doris, his wife, as she bathes, jailcell bars appearing across Freddy Riedenschneider as he discusses Doris’ case, and so on.

The Coen Brothers are often disparaged for the “distracting” quality of their visual style, but after all, film is a visual medium; the camera should always be the primary vehicle for telling the story. As in literature, lesser stylists can often detract from the subject, while gifted stylists open worlds of possibility that elevate the material to a level only the best works of art ever attain. The Coens have joined the second, very elite group of filmmakers. Though not their best film, “The Man Who Wasn’t There” is their finest visual achievement, and (if they weren’t there already) places them in the company of the truly great directors. Strangely, Kodak must be given some credit: the color process first used for “O Brother Where Art Thou?” (as discussed in the DVD) was apparently a new and groundbreaking process, and allowed the Coens (with cinematographer Roger Deakins) to create the lush black and white photography in “The Man Who Wasn’t There”.

As in Woody Allen’s underrated “Shadows and Fog”, all this stylish black and white photography is used to play up a classic modern theme, one might even say the only modern theme: crisis of identity. The film is a very working-class brand of existentialism, and might have been the “common man” film Barton Fink would have written if he’d stuck around Hollywood. Billy Bob Thornton is perfect in the role of Ed Crane, not only because he has a slight resemblance to Fred MacMurray (which was deliberate, I’m sure, since “Double Indemnity” is one of the film’s analogues), but also because the rigid, rocky contours of his face stand out against the smoothness of the rest of the film and suggest a complicated inner life that belies his apparent aversion to speaking. Even without the voiceover narration, you could watch Thornton and understand that there’s a lot going on behind those watchful eyes. Here he’s as good or better than his mesmerizing turn in “Sling Blade”; after various big-budget show-up-and-collect-the-paycheck jobs, he restores our faith in him. Ed is a man of the last century, specifically the middle of the century, when the Russians were testing the A-bomb and Einstein was still alive, talk of uncertainty principles was in the air, and alien invasions weren’t so far fetched. Simply, Ed is aware of his smallness in the universe, and how he comes to terms with his insignificance is the heart of the story.

Ah yes, the story: my own understanding of “The Man Who Wasn’t There” is informed by my readings of two authors, Nabokov and Robbe-Grillet, so those whose faces color with impending illness when books are discussed in movie reviews would do well to skip this next part.

The plot, your typical noir thriller involving adultery, embezzlement, and murder, is merely a mask of fictions, and therefore of secondary importance in understanding “what really happened”. So is the science fiction plot, and the illicit underage love affair plot. Much of what you see probably didn’t happen at all: in a wonderful twist, Ed, “the man who wasn’t there”, is perhaps the only reality in the movie. You can be sure of just three things: one, Ed has lost his wife; two, Ed has come to a new understanding of his place in the universe, most likely because of imminent death; and three, Ed is telling his story (or stories) for a boys’ pulp magazine. The last fact is the most important: you could say Ed’s story is the confession of a white, widowed male—the subtitle to Nabokov’s “Lolita”. In fact, Ed has a lot in common with Humbert Humbert. Both have apparently committed a murder, have loved a woman deeply (Doris is but a ‘Lo’-less ‘Dolores’, Lolita’s legal name), are in prison awaiting death, and have chosen to conceal their true selves using a series of generic deceptions germane to their medium of choice, Humbert’s being the novel, Ed’s being the pulp magazine (or movie).

Ed tips his hand in a line that initially seems more for comic than anything else: “Me, I don’t talk much” he says, after an ear-bending monologue to start the film. But that’s critically important later, at the movie’s end, when he says, about meeting Doris in the afterlife, “Maybe there I’ll be able to say all the things they don’t have words for here”. Ed is telling us that his story cannot be told as it happened because there are no words for his feelings. There is no language to convey his loss, his love, and so he has chosen a series of pulp clichés to tell his story, just as Humbert glosses dozens of literary sources to hide the truth of his existence from all but the most intrepid and imaginative readers (a difference worth mentioning is that Humbert is an artist of rare brilliance and insolent insincerity, while Ed is much clumsier and much more sincere). If we take Ed as a type—the common man—then his choice of narrative conventions is the Coens’ way of making a fascinating observation that movies have permeated our consciousness to such a degree that they’ve become our only way of making sense of ourselves and our common human experiences.

Ed’s story is also reminiscent of Robbe-Grillet’s detective thrillers, notably “The Erasers”, in which a man, ostensibly a ‘special agent’, must catch a killer. The plot of the book is standard detective fare, but the real story, Wallas’ personal story of a lost loved one, is buried inside it, only appearing from time to time. You have to look through the story to see the story, and Wallas’ official task eventually evanesces to expose the personal search underpinning the text. The Coens have used a similar method—Ed’s real self only comes out in the margins of the driving noir plot. I would like to watch the film again on DVD and make note of when he is placed in shadows and when illuminated, because I suspect he is darkened in the scenes that are largely plottish, and only fully illuminated in those scenes that have little or nothing to do with the plot. Impatient viewers will grow weary of the film’s slow pacing, but the meandering scenes that are seemingly extraneous are actually the most important.

Another Nabokov, this time “The Eye”, is most enlightening regarding “The Man Who Wasn’t There”. The book details the imaginative (or dream) life of a young Russian émigré in Berlin around 1925, its plot centering around his obsession with Vanya, a young woman betrothed to another. Like Ed, Smurov is a man who isn’t really there, a spectral presence whose core self remains unknown and unknowable to those around him. At the end of the book, the reader must realize that a good deal of Smurov’s story has been a sham, much of its substance cribbed from literature, namely Pushkin and Lermontov, yet he defends his willing immersion in his own imaginative life: “I swear that this is happiness. What does it matter that I am a bit cheap, a bit foul, and that no one appreciates all the remarkable things about me—my fantasy, my erudition, my literary gift…I am happy that I can gaze at myself, for any man is absorbing—yes, really absorbing! The world, try as it may, cannot insult me. I am invulnerable. Every other night I dream of [Vanya’s] dresses and things on an endless clothesline of bliss, in a ceaseless wind of procession, and her husband shall never learn what I do to the silks and fleece of the dancing witch. This is love’s supreme accomplishment. I am happy—yes, happy! What more can I do to prove it, how to proclaim that I am happy? Oh, to shout it so that all of you believe me at last, you cruel, smug people…” Smurov is talking about the perfect, idealized world of the imagination, and really of art itself. A few decades later, Nabokov would have Humbert write: “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.”This “refuge of art” is Ed Crane’s only shelter, and the future with Doris he might find in the afterlife is really the immortality of art, and like Nabokov’s protagonists, he openly denies any obligation to reveal to his audience the naked facts of his life. The artifice suffices, and how.

For these reasons, “The Man Who Wasn’t There” seems to me to be about art itself: how we hide or reveal ourselves in art, the generic rules of that art, and the transcendence, if any, to be found in the distorting mirrors art provides. The Coen Brothers love movies, and their mastery of and mirthful toying with the visual lingo of movies are commentaries on the medium itself. Ed’s story is really about a normal man who can tell his story only in the language of cinema. His is a genuine love story, and as for its more philosophic content, I go back and forth wondering if the Coen Brothers flavored Ed with existential doubt because they were really moved by those themes, or because they felt bound to provide a largely cosmetic, soul-searching subtext. In any case, “The Man Who Wasn’t There” is a breathtaking examination of movies and how or what they reveal about the people who make them—and those who watch them.