Miller’s Crossing took a more subdued approach, and Barton Fink continues in that vein. In their first two films, the Coens did everything but swing the camera from the ceiling to call attention to their technical prowess. These days, with one-note movies like Regarding Henry, Dying Young and The Doctor ladling out sentiment like butter on popcorn, complexity is regarded as a failure to communicate.Ī more disturbing charge against the Coens – in that it has some validity – is their tendency to put style ahead of substance.
The Coens make you dig to discover someone’s true nature. What is true is that these characters are unsympathetic (a cheating wife, a kidnapper, a hood) and don’t wear their hearts on their sleeves. It’s a facile charge, easily disproved when you consider the depth of feeling in the characters played by Frances McDormand in Blood Simple, Holly Hunter in Raising Arizona and Gabriel Byrne in Miller’s Crossing. Coen bashers consider this raiding of Hollywood’s past to be grounds for dismissing the brothers as clever showoffs trying to hide the emotional emptiness of their films. Blood Simple was their take on film noir, Raising Arizona the screwball comedy and Miller’s Crossing the gangster epic.
Ethan Coen, 34, has a degree in philosophy from Princeton but shares his brother’s lifelong obsession with genre movies. Joel Coen, 36, is a graduate of New York University’s film school. The Minnesota-born Coens are most frequently hoisted on the petard of their own curriculum vitae. Though Fink rarely leaves his room, the Coens have fashioned a tale that encompasses betrayal, murder, genocide, world war and figures as diverse as Louis B. What starts as a slyly ambitious sendup of Faust – Fink is a serious New York playwright tempted to sell his soul for success in movies – ends as an apocalyptic vision of a world ablaze with hypocrisy. But they drop dark hints – Barton Fink is the most chilling Hollywood comedy since Sunset Boulevard. With perverse glee, the Coens never let us see what’s in the box. The box figures prominently in the climax of Barton Fink, the partly hilarious, partly horrific, totally mesmerizing new film from these Hardy Boys from hell.Ĭharlie Meadows (John Goodman), a good-natured slob of a traveling salesman, has entrusted the mystery parcel to Barton Fink (John Turturro), a creatively blocked screenwriter who lives next door to him in a shabby Los Angeles hotel, circa 1942.
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This is a movie from the Coen brothers, and as you may have gleaned from their earlier work (Blood Simple, Raising Arizona and Miller’s Crossing), the Coens do not traffic in the mundane. Wrapped in plain brown paper and no bigger than a typically swelled Hollywood head, the box looks ordinary.
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