Learn to listen
Added 2/3/2010
So in my path through the Coen Brother's career in sequence, I come to Barton Fink.
Blood Simple was a great noir debut about misunderstanding identity.
Raising Arizona was a screwball comedy about stealing an identity.
Miller's Crossing was a deep gangster movie about discovering identity ("Nobody knows anybody. Not that well")
Barton Fink is about understanding your own identity. Barton Fink (John Turturro) is a New Yorker of New Yorkers--intellectual, introspective, passive-aggresive, self-absorbed, Jewish. After writing a hit Broadway play, he goes off to Hollywood to cash in on his good reviews by writing for the movies at $1,000 per week. He makes the move at his agent's insistence, not willingly on his own part - an interesting point because it is the only time in the movie he displays accurate self-awareness.
Once in Hollywood, he moves into the seedy long-term residence Hotel Earle, whose long hideously-wallpapered hallways lined by dozens of rooms seem to be occupied only by Fink, unseen neighbors on one side who enjoy loud and frequent love making, and his neighbor on the other side Charlie--a "common man" who barges in on Fink's solitary but unproductive writing sessions. For Fink has settled into a deep writers block as he looks for the serious and the important in his first assignment--a wrestling picture to star Noah Beery.
The solution to Fink's problem is right in front of him, literally larger than life, in John Goodman's back-slapping, easy-going Charlie, who wants to help Fink by telling him stories and showing him wrestling moves, but Fink is too self-absorbed to see it. "You don't listen!", Charlie shouts out him near the end of the movie after a huge plot twist has revealed there is more to Charlie than the happy veneer. Listening is the key to the movie--both Charlie and Barton resort to cotton-ball earplugs at different points to keep from hearing things they don't want to hear--and what they miss hearing leaves them psychically and spiritually handicapped. And while Fink moves into his room (and stays there despite a studio offer of a better place) to "stay in touch" with the common man, never has a character been more out of touch with his surroundings.
Old Hollywood is lovingly portrayed in the movie. The period touches are all perfect in classic Coen style. The dark Hotel Earle (why does desk clerk Steve Buscemi--Chet!--emerge from a trap door in the floor behind the desk?) contrasts perfectly with the brilliantly and unrelentingly bright Southern California sunshine (that brought the movies to Hollywood in the first place). The studio characters are dead on perfect: the vulgar self-made studio head, his sycophantic assistant, the venal and two-faced producer, the soused older writer who cashed in like Fink and is now a tragically wasted drunk. The interplay between these characters is also captured in perfect scenes of high-speed movie vocabulary straight from Variety's stylebook, false humility and camaraderie, sudden petulant anger, and language that never says exactly what it means.
Through it all Barton moves in his self-absorbed funk, failing to hear between the lines at the studio and failing to take the offers for help that Charlie throws directly at him back at the Earle. We've all known people like him--so self-absorbed yet so unaware of self that they have no idea of who they really are, and of how others see them. He is at the end a pathetic but unsympathetic character, which makes this a harder movie to like.
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Doesn't Disappoint.
Added 11/30/2009
This classic Coen brothers title fully embraces the concept of dark comedy. It has quickly become one of my favorite films. Watch this movie. As long as you know not to expect happy or light-hearted cinema you won't be disappointed.
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You Can Still be Intelligent & Dislike this Movie!
Added 10/26/2009
I originally saw BARTON FINK years ago and I just didn't get it. The Coen Brothers put out films at a fairly regular pace so it's easy to forgive them for missteps and move on. But I just watched BARTON FINK again to see if I missed anything, if there was more that I got this time.
No. Not really.
BARTON FINK never has the momentum or mastery of Billy Wilder's classic Hollywood masterpiece, SUNSET BOULEVARD. It never has the fun or focus of Woody Allen's BULLETS OVER BROADWAY, another film about a pompous East Coast playwright who learns about humility (instead of John Turturro staring--literally--at wallpaper peeling, Jon Cusack is forced to face the fact that he isn't as talented as the Mafia goon sent to keep an eye on a Mob boss's girlfriend acting in his play). The setting for this film isn't anything new, obviously, but that BARTON FINK chooses to remain so inaccessible makes it an ultimately frustrating experience.
Did John Goodman kill the girl? Why? What was in the box left in Turturro's room? What did the final shot mean? I thought this was movie about Hollywood in the 40s and then quite suddenly it's a serial murderer crime story.
The Coen Brothers can always be counted on to make visually interesting films and BARTON FINK is that. But it's also alienating and remote (and not in a good way).
And pretty slow in some sections.
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Even the most avid fan of Joel and Ethan Coen can watch Batron Fink repeatedly over a lifetime and not figure the ending out. It is a funny film, but certianly not the comedy of Big Lubowski or Fargo.
A quick and inaddaqute summery: Barton Fink goes to 1941 Hollywood to write for the old studio system. He stays at a fleabag hotel, and befrineds his neighbor Charlie Munt. The morning after a trist with another writer's wife, she is found dead in his bed. He is questioned by the police, but before the crime is solved, the police are killed by Barton's neighbor.
You really need to see the film, but for those who have, let's poke at meanings of the ending. When Munt kills the detectives, he runs down the hallway, followed by flames. He bellows "I'll show you the life of the mind" when blowing the cops away with a double barrel.
Has Barton gone to hell? Certianly his enslavement by the studio system and the flames at the murder suggest that. He seeks to write for "the common man" but is trapped because he has no empathy with his intended audiance. He cannot even see the stories of those around him--in one part, Munt could have given him the whole story for the screenplay, but Barton rambles about the life of the mind. Is Munt the devil, walking Fink through hell, showing him with butchery what he is too self-involved to grasp through everyday experiance.
Look at it another way: Barton Fink is set during the Holocaust. Fink is American and Jewish, but does not seem to pick up on the anti-semitism thrown his way. Munt kills the detective, who had insulted Fink ethnically, saying "Hial Hitler." This is a dig on the cop, but it may also be a way of bringing bigotry to Fink's attention. Fink has big ambitions, but wastes them on self-agrandizment and b-movie scripts. When Munt yells "I will show you the life of the mind" while killing the police, he is really talking to Fink. Fink holds a box which most likely contains his dead lover's head, but he carries it without opening or finding out what is in there. He CHOOSES not to know. Like America during this time, Fink is too wrapped up in himself to see evil until it is in flames outside his door. When asking Munt why he picked Fink, Munt shouts "BECAUSE YOU DON'T LISTEN." Is the Hotel or the studio a concentration camp? It is rare Fink is seen outside either.
I am not this brilliant: the hell idea was mine, but the alternate holocaust theme I'll freely confess has been around for years. The filmmakers have not been forthcomming with the meaning of the ending, leaving it subjective for the audiance. But since the end of the film has events that could not happen--the spontainous fire which Munt carries with him--it is not a streach to argue that the ending takes place in Hell, Nazi Occupied Europe, Fink's mind--or in any number of places at the same time.
The common thread of possible themes is not in real time or physical space, but in Fink's self-involvement and apathy and how they return to haunt him. The Coen's have meanings here, but they are liquid meanings, that can absolutely co-exisist.
Oh yeah. Great flick.
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EVERYBODY WRITES ABOUT HOLLYWOOD, BUT EVER TRIED TO LIVE IN SCHOLEM ALECHEM-LAND?
Added 5/19/2009
If it works for you its a financial paradise. If it doesn't, its a culturalloy desolate and desolating carnival of sunshine, depravity and decay. You can't have it both ways. But the truth is, Hollywood is not only what it is; that is to say a movie-biz carney town, but a metropolitan entity of mythological dimension. Like Venice, it's improbable; both flashy and shabby, simultaneously. And it too stinks. But...
In BARTON FINK Hollywood is one of the central characters of the story. And the story, proceeding out of Barton's persona, his east-coast, Jesish/Communist up-bringing and moralistic view, has a palpable middle-european flavor. It's much like a Dostoyevski or a Scholem Aleichem story, both grippingly funny, god-haunted, and hideous. BF has elements of self-parody in it too, and glibly displays that form of self-hatred possessing some Jews, who refer to themselves, in private, as Kikes. A throwback to the Ellis Island experience when immigrant Polish/Russian Jews unable to read and write English, refused to "make their mark" on a form with a cross (for reasons not obvious to the goyem) but instead chose to mark their forms with a circle, or Kikle, and became -- with their decendants -- forever Kikes. And this wonderful nugget of self-identification and self-loathing is part and parcel of what is the movie business, a Jewish business, within, for and surrounded by a population of white or anglo-saxon gentiles it simultaneously employs and entertains, who not only hate them, but (in the war-time era) segregates them, legally, in housing and everywhere else.
NOSTALGIA: I guess I was about 12 when looking through the Chicago Tribune want ads one Sunday, I asked my mother about something, some phrase I kept coming across. It was something like "Non-christians need not apply." What's it mean? She said, "No Jews."
Well, BF takes place in or around 1941, so the time is about right. It's Segregated Hollywood. And there's Barton, with his kinky pompadour and Andre Gide Socialist spectacles jitterbugging at the USO with a pretty shikseh. A social idealist, hired to do a Wallace Beery wrestling picture. Nu?
Listen to me: This is a picture that will break your heart if you haven't sold out already!
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