Barton Fink
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Movie Reviews of Barton Fink
Movie Review: Startling and impenetrable.
Summary: 5 Stars
Easily the smartest of the Cohen Bros. films (and the darkest), Barton Fink employs an amazing economy of substance to weave a multiplicity of complex stories and meanings into an entertaining piece of very appealing cinematography.To be found here are a number of different parables, all well-developed and supported by the meticulous detail in the film... everything from an allegory on the rise and course of Nazism during the 1940's, to a critique of communism constructed as warning about the secretly borgeious nature of the common man's intellectual, to an 8 1/2-esque statement about the dangerous and self-digesting face of the commercial-artistic milieu in the modern marketplace-studio. At play also are a number of riddles, including an imagined head that pits postmodernism against phenomenology, a biblical dance with Nebuchadnezzar for those who know their Bible, and a reversal of the narrative order through the presence of a hidden film-within-a-film.
Many mainstream critics focus on one particular interpretation of the film or fixate on one of these riddles and gloss the rest of the film's richness away as "surrealism" or "stylized darkness." Readers who read a number of these seemingly disparate reviews might be startled to find them all to be correct when held up to the film itself. A much more enjoyable way to explore the complexity and astonishing intelligence of the writing behind Barton Fink, however, is to watch it repeatedly.
Indeed, you'll notice something new, connect a few different dots in a different way, each time you see it. That the Cohen Bros. were not more richly rewarded for constructing such a remarkable "text" is sad indeed!
One of the best films of the twentieth century.
Movie Review: Shrewd Moral Fable
Summary: 5 Stars
An effete self-absorbed writer, Barton Fink, has a hedge-bush hairdo that recalls the nebbish protagonist from Eraserhead. Indeed, like Lynch's cult masterpiece, Barton Fink is a nightmare that studies the consequences of having no empathy. The dramatist turned screenwriter leaves New York for Los Angeles. He is hardly a sympathetic character. He spends his time pontificating about his mission to save the masses and to write about the "common man," but he is too full of himself to connect with anyone or produce any art that would touch the human condition. As a man who can not empathize or listen to others, he must pay the price, which is nothing short of descending into a partly self-created hell. In a shrewd touch, the film sets clues upon clues to amass a symbol dream narrative about the costs of not being able to listen to others. For example, we see Barton accidentally trading shoes with the gargantuan John Goodman who plays his neighbor Charlie at the hotel. The shoes, of course, represent the adage walking in a pair of someone's shoes to understand their condition.
Charlie is a mysterious character, unctuous, larger than life, earnest, in need of being loved, of telling his stories to anyone who will lend an ear, but his hotel neighbor Barton, too pompous to listen, insults Charlie with consequences that you'll have to see in the film.
Without giving away the plot, let me just say this film is a fable about the need to listen to the common man. It is also a film that skewers the quest for fame and money. The film has spiritual cousins, one being Mulholland Drive, another film about the tragedy that results from blind ambition and deals people make with the devil.
Movie Review: When the demons escape from the box!
Summary: 5 Stars
This winner film in Cannes Festival 1991, belongs to the ten best American cinematographic jewels of that decade.
This penetrating script deals with the rise of New York playwright who achieved success, is hired as screenwriter by producers in Hollywood during the early forties.
The Coen brothers explore with magisterial intensity the war times madness in which the evasion was the raw material and the main ingredient for the industry of the entertainment. So this talented but not great writer will be pressured by the producers to make a script about the free wrestle. He feels uncomfortable and lacks inspiration, because he is firmly convinced about the role of the art as device of transformation in the human being. When he exposes these standpoints in the famous sequence of the swimming pool, he sounds as he was out of his mind, because he has not captured the mission of the business. But meanwhile in his hotel room, he will meet his neighbor room, a very weird personage (John Goodman made the greatest performance of his lifetime) who eventually will become his only intersection line respect the outer world. On the other hand, seeking inspiration he gets to meet to a brilliant but decaying writer in order to find some clues to make his expected project come true .
You have basically in this cocktail of hallucinating set of fevered personages a satiric metaphor around many, many issues. In sum, a cinematographic jewel all the way through, provided with all the accurate dosis of violence, drama and fine humor.
Movie Review: The life of the mind
Summary: 5 Stars
Probably the most enigmatic of the Coen Bros. movies, Barton Fink makes you think. In a professed exploration into "the life of the mind," the Coens have created a very much internalized movie that will appeal to some and turn off many others. While they still retain many of their crazy antics, they are turned to razor sharp perfection in this movie, as we find a horribly lonely Barton Fink trying to come up with a script for a wrestling movie in a Hollywood hotel that seems to have a life of its own.John Turturro is insufferable to watch as he wrestles with all the self-obsessed emotions of Barton. You just want to strangle him, as my wife said, but then it is this quality that makes the movie work. It is indeed painful to watch. Barton seems to be purposefully digging himself into a deep rut as he tries to find the essence of the burly man, yet hasn't got the first clue as to what makes a wrestler tick, much less what his producer is looking for in the movie. Charlie Meadows, played to a tee by John Goodman, illucidates Barton on the mind of the wrestler, but with disastrous consequences.
The Coens once again seem to be drawing on a wide variety of tabloid accounts, a la Raising Arizona, but string these caricatures together in a most diabolical way. The once gifted writer Bill Mayhew whiffs of Faulkner, but the parallels shouldn't be taken too seriously. More important to pick up on the symbols the Coens provide which foreshadow the events to come. This is very fine filmmaking, if you have the patience to soak it all in.
Movie Review: Another Coen Brothers Classic!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
I recently purchased "Barton Fink" along with "Miller's Crossinhg", another Coen Brothers gem.
Barton Fink quite simply is a writer who cannot see the forest for the trees. He is so taken with the fact that he is a writer that he can't write. He is so idealistic that he misses fantastic opportunities to become a writer for the ages because he wastes precious time proeselytizing. John Goodman perfectly sums up eveyone's frustration with Barton Fink when after a series of unfortunate occurrences, Barton asks him "Why me?" to which John's character answers "Because you don't LISTEN!"
Set in 1930s Hollywood we follow the exploits of a one-hit wonder, Barton Fink, who has written a successful Broadway play and is summoned by the powers that be to Hollywood. After much cajoling to take the job from his agent, Barton arrives in Los Angeles determined to become the writer for the common man where he insists true stories live. The trouble with Barton, however, is he does not have time for the common man because he has so romanticised their lot as well as his particular quest in speaking for them.
Excellent performances from John Turturo, John Goodman, Judy Davis, John Polito (often overlooked, but his scenes ALWAYS become his!!) and the inimitable Tony Shalub.
I have decided after a slew of Coen Brothers films I currently have in my collection, that any project these guys are involved with deserve more than passing scrutiny.