The first Coen brothers film to disappoint. That's not to say it's not good, certainly not to say it's not even as good as their first, Blood Simple, when there could be no expectations and so no disappointment. The brothers have not suddenly lost their touch. They do for Billy Bob Thornton what they did before for George Clooney in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Tim Robbins in The Hudsucker Proxy, namely make an unpalatable actor palatable, largely by gifting him with an interesting and well-written character, in this case a morbidly withdrawn barber employed in his brother-in-law's shop in post-WWII Santa Rosa, and a would-be ground-floor investor in a new-fangled enterprise known as dry cleaning. (It's delightful how this term doesn't just trip off the actors' tongues, but falters as if in a foreign language.) Where the Coens lit fires under the cool Clooney and Robbins, they throw a muzzle over the usually unbridled Thornton. Open and gabby enough in his first-person narration ("Me, I don't talk much" and "Me, I don't like entertaining"), he is practically catatonic in demeanor, allowing us to study and appreciate the Edward G. Robinson plushness of his lips, the Walter Huston boniness of his skull, not to mention the aerodynamic crimp in his toupee. (The barbering details, particularly the live illustrations of men's hairstyles from the Butch to the Flattop to the Executive Contour, are precious but few, and are never as compelling as the barber's dark inner thoughts on his profession: shorn hair as a form of human waste.) A mostly morose, spasmodically winking pastiche of James M. Cain, the film has the artistic detachment we expect of the Coens -- always happy to put words such as "Wop," "Nip," "Heinie," and "pansy" into the mouths of their characters, even the more sympathetic ones -- and it has, in some measure, the ingenuity of plotting we expect as well. (The hero's money-raising scheme: to blackmail his wife's lover anonymously for the affair he secretly suspects.) Yet there is something unexcitingly déjà-vu -- Eng. trans., been there, done that -- about the spiralling way in which the plot goes awry, and something hand-me-down about the roundabout way (straight from the Cain fields) in which justice ultimately gets done. Then, too, the suspicion arises that the novelty of the brothers' first essay in black-and-white was supposed to make up for any lack of freshness and originality elsewhere. And the black-and-white, at least the daytime black-and-white, no matter how "appropriate" or "correct" (or pedantic or obvious) a choice it was for a period film noir, looks a little pale, a little milky, a little washed-out. Frances McDormand, James Gandolfini, Michael Badalucco, Jon Polito, Tony Shalhoub, Scarlett Johansson. (2001) — Duncan Shepherd