The Man Who Was All There

A war of the posters is going on in a certain acting family. They’re battling on the streets and walls of this film festival town. The husband is losing, badly, but he’s enchanted and, frankly, bemused.

“My wife’s here, big as hell,” says Billy Bob Thornton, pointing over his shoulder at the huge blowups of Angelina Jolie as “Lara Croft, Tomb Raider” that dwarf the entrance to the Carlton Hotel. He turns, points across the room at the image for the Coen brothers’ competition film “The Man Who Wasn’t There” and grins. “And here’s my poster; it’s all my back. She’s as big as a building, and you don’t know who that guy is.”

When Billy Bob Thornton grins, you have to grin with him: his deep-set eyes, open manner and down-home Arkansas accent almost compel complicity. Wearing jeans, a Metallica T-shirt, a Henry Swing Club baseball cap and a gaggle of chains and crosses around his neck, Thornton is at his most engaging when discussing his wife, their relationship and the public’s intense interest in it.

“We’re the least likely people to be actually successful at it, but yet we are,” he says. “People thought, ‘Oh boy, they’re both insane, this is going to last a week.’ But when you think about it, if you put two insane people together, maybe that’s good.

“We both love people, we both want to be liked, but we put on a tough exterior for years, smoking, drinking, having tattoos. We saved each other’s lives, spiritually and physically. We quit smoking, we quit drinking, but we still get tattoos.”

In fact, just last week in Baton Rouge, La., celebrating their first wedding anniversary, they got some more--Thornton opens his arms to point out the new ones. On his left forearm is his wife’s name, with four red drops of blood dripping from it, symbolizing “the two of us and my two boys” (from a previous marriage). On his right forearm is an arcane symbol that Jolie came up with that “means something to us and no one else. We’re head over heels crazy for each other. Most people want time to stand still, but we want it to speed up, for us to be together for five years so we can have that history behind us.”

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Thornton is almost as enthusiastic about the Coens and “The Man Who Wasn’t There” as he is about his wife. “I’m not one of those people who say ‘This one was better’ or ‘I didn’t like the bowling movie so much,’ ” he explains. “I love all of them, everything they do.” So much so that he committed to this picture without reading a script.

“When they offered me the lead I was just tickled to death. I said, ‘It’s about time we did one together,’ ” the actor, who’s known the brothers socially for seven or eight years, recalls. “I asked what it was about and when they said ‘a barber who wants to be in the dry-cleaning business,’ I said yes.”

Set in Santa Rosa, Calif., in the late 1940s, directed by Joel Coen and exquisitely shot in black and white by Roger Deakins, “The Man Who Wasn’t There” is a polished black diamond, a spoof of film noir in general and works of James M. Cain like “Double Indemnity” and “The Postman Always Rings Twice” in particular. A smart and playful existential comedy (“It’s the movie Martin Heidegger would have written if he’d gone to Hollywood,” producer Ethan Coen joked at Cannes last year), it details the disastrous consequences of downtrodden barber Ed Crane’s sudden desire to change his life.

“You know in those Roadrunner cartoons, when the coyote is about to be hit by a boulder, that one little look he takes at the audience?” Thornton asks. “Ed’s like that all the time. He’s every minute not knowing why he’s there.”

Because Thornton has such exceptional screen presence, an ability, Joel Coen says, “to be passive without disappearing,” he is one of the few actors who could make the expressionless, sepulchral Crane involving on screen. But that doesn’t mean it was easy.

“Actors by nature want to be noticed, and here I am, playing a guy who’s like the wall,” Thornton explains. “People think the hard thing for an actor is crying and screaming, but that’s easy. What’s hard is a character who never tips his hand, who toes the line all the time. The hard stuff is never telling yourself, ‘Hey, I better do something here.’ ”

But perhaps because he’s voluble in life, Thornton found that “I loved it, actually, that I didn’t talk much. I got to get that part of myself out, the part of me that wants to be alone, to be with my memories. I feel a little bit odd sometimes, depressed, wondering: Do I fit? I still feel a little bit like an outsider; I’ve got that sort of chip on my shoulder.”

Thornton was helped by the Coens’ relaxed shooting style (“I didn’t have to stand in a corner for half an hour with the director trying to talk me out of doing something”) and the skill of his co-star, Frances McDormand, who plays Ed’s wife, Doris.

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“It’s hard to beat her, and she’s such a regular person,” Thornton says. “You’d be about to do a scene and she’ll say, ‘What are we having for lunch?’ She told me the whole time she had no idea about her character, and then you see the movie and you see she knows exactly what she’s doing.”

Thornton was in part so enthusiastic about his work with the Coens because of a kind of frustration with much of the American film scene from the point of view of an actor who’s “not in every blockbuster but not like some totally weird only-do-art-films guy.” Studio films are “so loud, so bright,” while “with independent films, if it’s not about a one-legged grapefruit salesman who screws his mother, it’s not cutting-edge.” Still, despite having several pictures, including last year’s “All the Pretty Horses” to his credit, Thornton would rather act than direct.

“Directing is more heartbreaking in a lot of ways,” he says. “Being in ‘Armageddon’ didn’t kill my career, but with directing you’re kind of held responsible. You’re involved in every facet; you get to know the people who buy cheese, and if the movie doesn’t do well you have more of a feeling of letting others down.”

Which is one of the reasons why the actor is jazzed about a notion floated by the “Man Who Wasn’t There” filmmakers. “They want to do a Tarzan movie with me as Tarzan,” he says, delighted. “I’d bulk up for them, wear my hair long. The Coens and Billy Bob Thornton do Tarzan. Not a bad idea. I’d do it in a second.”