director
Joel Coen
screenwriters
Ethan Coen
Joel Coen
producer
Ethan Coen
cinematographer
Roger Deakins
music
Carter Burwell
editor
"Roderick Jaynes" (the Coens)
cast
John Turturro (Barton Fink)
John Goodman (Charlie Meadows)
Judy Davis (Audrey Taylor)
Michael Lerner (Jack Lipnick)
John Mahoney (W.P. Mayhew)
Tony Shalhoub (Ben Geisler)
Jon Polito (Lou Breeze)
Steve Buscemi (Chet)
David Warrilow (Garland Stanford)
Richard Portnow (Mastrionotti)
Christopher Murney (Deutsch)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 116m
u.s.
release: August 21,
1991
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other coen
bros. films
reviewed on this website:
- the
big lebowski
- blood
simple
- fargo
- the
hudsucker proxy
- intolerable
cruelty
- the
ladykillers
- the
man who wasn't there
- miller's
crossing
- o
brother, where art thou?
- raising
arizona
|
Barton
Fink, the nightmarish,
grisly, and very funny black comedy from Joel and Ethan Coen,
defies description. It's beyond description. What is it
about? Well, it's about writer's block. It's about pus. It's
about mosquitoes and desolation, and mosquitoes as symbols of
desolation. It's about a sealed cardboard box just big enough
to hold ... a severed head. Mostly, it's about Barton Fink (John
Turturro), a New York playwright. It's 1941, and Barton's first
play -- Bare Ruined Choirs -- is a hit. Hollywood takes
notice: there's a fresh new voice out there, the voice of the
common man. Capitol Pictures, headed by the boisterous exec Jack
Lipnick (Michael Lerner in a juicy caricature performance), hires
Barton to write a wrestling picture for Wallace Beery; they put
him up at the dingy Hotel Earle in Los Angeles.
Of course, when Barton sits in front of his immense black Underwood,
the words won't come. He tries to find his way into the script
the same way he began the Odetsian, nobility-of-the-common-man
play that got him this job, but he can't shift into Hollywood-hack
mode. It just isn't in him. He's the only one who knows how wrong
he is for the assignment, yet he plugs away at it, because the
money is good -- $1,000 a week. So he tries to prostitute his
talent, and he can't even do it, and the world is slowly pressing
down on him.
In the early scenes, the Coens -- Joel as director, Ethan as
producer, and both of them as cowriters -- capture the dead-end
squalor of Barton's surroundings, which mirror his inner decay.
His hotel room, with its gangrenous peeling wallpaper (oozing
with a gluey substance that strongly suggests semen) and its
mosquitoes giving off a maddening buzz at all hours, is lighted
(by ace cinematographer Roger Deakins) to look like a Florida
swamp. You get itchy just looking at it. Lipnick offers to put
Barton up at a nicer place, but Barton declines: The dismal room
is his last contact with grubby, inner-city realism. He's the
artist as masochist -- to Create, he must Suffer.
And suffer he does. One night, Barton's fitful work is interrupted
by noises from the room next door: a man crying, laughing, muttering
to himself. Concerned and a bit annoyed, Barton calls the hotel
bellboy and complains. Within minutes, the man from next door
looms in Barton's doorway, his face pink with fury. He's big,
beefy Charlie Meadows (John Goodman), a lonely insurance salesman
who at first nails Barton with a hot, accusatory stare: You
got a problem with me, pal? In time, though, Charlie turns
apologetic and friendly, offering Barton a swig from his flask.
They become buddies, though Barton soon wishes they hadn't. Charlie
is amiable enough, but he seems to be rotting. The pus that trickles
from his infected left ear is like the slime that oozes from
the wallpaper. Something's not quite right about Charlie.
Barton Fink also considers the real Barton Finks of old
Tinseltown -- the serious novelists and playwrights who tried
to play the Hollywood game and were broken in half. A subplot
introduces a figure Barton is in danger of becoming: W.P. Mayhew
(John Mahoney), a Faulkneresque rummy who cranks out bum screenplays,
drowns in booze when the "lit'ry" muse won't come,
and leaves most of the writing to his secretary and lover Audrey
(Judy Davis). The fates of Mayhew and Audrey are the film's turning
point, after which Barton Fink becomes a chilly, surreal
horror movie.
Barton Fink is fascinating in a creepy way, and so are
the performances. John Turturro, who's made a career of being
disagreeable (Five Corners, Do the Right Thing,
the Coens' Miller's
Crossing), isn't likable here, either; he speaks in strangled
tones and lets his sunken eyes bulge behind his nerd glasses.
(He also sports an Eraserhead 'do that makes him look
a bit like Ethan Coen.) His Barton Fink is a stubbly rat in a
maze: tormented, furtive, miserable. Yet Turturro finds the manic-depressive
comedy in Barton; you don't resent his passivity or his slouching
around as if chained to the floor by his neck. Barton, potentially
a drag, is a painfully funny character thanks to Turturro.
John Goodman has the zestier role. Like Turturro, he's worked
with the Coens before (Raising Arizona), and their camera
worships him. Most of his line readings are a bit stiff, and
after a while I realized it was by design: Charlie the salesman
talks without believing what he's saying -- they're just words.
Goodman brings weight to the movie, and not just physical. He
shows you the terrified emptiness behind Charlie's joviality.
And in the end, when he cuts loose, he's as touching as he is
frightening; I can't think of another actor who could have brought
off the apocalyptic finale without looking ridiculous. Working
with the Coens must unleash something primeval in this teddy-bear
comedian most people know from TV's Roseanne. He puts
on a ferocious show.
And so, once again, do the Coen brothers -- two highly original
filmmakers working at their peak. Barton Fink won't be
to every taste: It's austere and airless, and sometimes a little
too gleeful about putting the nails to its protagonist. But there's
no film like it, there never will be another film like it, and
it's everything the Coens' detractors hate and everything their
fans love. Frame for frame, this is a paranoid masterpiece. |