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Plot Synopsis: New York, 1941. Barton Fink (John Turturro), a playwrite, has made it big in the New York theatre scene. He has written a play, that has received rave reviews in the press, about the common man, fishmongers to be precise. Barton plays down his evident success as he has a vision, a vision of "a new, living theatre of, about, and for the common man!" Now Hollywood wants a piece of that "Barton Fink feeling". At first Barton is hesitant about taking the job he has been offered (to write movie scripts for Capitol Pictures for between $1000 and $2000 per week) but he is talked into it by Garland, his agent.
Barton, wanting to remain as close to the common man, the main source of his inspiration, shuns the swanky Los Angeles hotels he is offered and chooses to stay in the Hotel Earle, which is, by all accounts, a horrid, grotty dive. From the second Barton enters the hotel things start to get more than a little odd. The hotel lobby is completely devoid of people and the reception is unmanned. Barton rings the desk-top bell and it's ring continues to sound indefinitely. After, what seems like minutes, Chet (Steve Buscemi) the hotel bell boy appears from a trap door behind the counter. After a bizarre conversation about transients and residents, Barton makes his way to his room. The rooms at the Hotel Earle are absolutely horrible, with damp, peeling, tacky wallpaper and the worst selection of furniture you could imagine including a bed with a worn-out, sunken mattress and the heat in the hotel is almost unbearable. His room contains a picture of a woman sitting on the beach looking out to sea, for some reason Barton is transfixed by the picture often stares at it. Yes, Barton is slumming it for the common man.
He meets with Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner in a role which got him nominated for Best Performance By an Actor in a Supporting Role at the 1991 Academy Awards), the studio MD who instantly brown-noses Barton, and Lou Breeze (Jon Polito), his underling, to discuss what he will write. Lipnick speaks quickly, spurting words like a machine gun would bullets, Barton cannot get a word in edge-ways. From the conversation Barton is given a film to write, a Wallace Beery wrestling picture, and he returns to the hotel to begin work.
Barton sits down at his trusty typewriter to begin work. Unfortunately, he has no experience of writing film or even watching them for that matter and he gets a massive case of writer's block. All he can come up with to begin his film is the exact same scene that began his much lauded play (A tenement building on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Early morning traffic is audible, as is the cry fishmongers) and the great line 'A large man in tights'. Muffled laughter from the room next door disturbs him further and his frustration boils over. He 'phones down to Chet to complain, Chet assures him that he'll sort it out. Seconds later we hear footsteps from next door followed by a loud knock on Barton's door. Nervously he opens it, to reveal a tubby man, Charlie Meadows (John Goodman) who doesn't look at all pleased. Phoning downstairs could possibly have been the worst thing Barton could have done- EVER. After a brief discussion Charlie apologises (like hell) for disturbing Barton and invites himself in for a drink. Eventually Barton and Charlie become good friends and spend much of the movie talking (and wrestling!).
Barton's writers block gets to him so much that he goes to speak to the movie's assigned producer, Ben Geisler (Tony Shalhoub) who advises him to speak to another writer. Barton, quite by co-incidence, meets W.P. Mayhew (John Mahoney), an alcoholic novelist who is now writing for the pictures. He is a hero of Barton's and he agrees to speak with Barton back at the writer's building at the studio. When Barton goes to Mayhews room the door is answered by a woman, Audrey Taylor (Judy Davis), who introduces herself as Mayhew's Personal Assistant and lover. Mayhew is a drunk who beats Audrey and she has written much of the work he is famous for, for him. Barton's opinion of Mayhew is blown to pieces.
With a dead line looming Barton rings Audrey for some help writing his script and ends up sleeping with her. Now a turn for the worst. Barton is woken by the buzzing of a mosquito, to find that Audrey is dead and is lying in a massive pool of blood. In a panic he screams and Charlie comes to check what is wrong with his friend. At first Charlie is made sick by the sight and then orders Barton in to the bathroom while he sorts out the mess. When he returns Barton has passed out on the bathroom floor. Charlie wakes him by slapping him in the face. Once he's awake Charlie instructs him to act like nothing has happened. Next day Charlie knocks on Bartons door and tells him that he has to go away on business and asks him to mind a brown paper-wrapped box, which he says contains a lot of personal stuff, until he returns. Barton gets scared about being left alone but Charlie reassures him that he'll be back soon.
Barton is visited by two police officers asking about his associations with Charlie Meadows. They tell Barton that Meadows is a fake name and that Charlie's real name is Karl Mundt or Madman Mundt to his friends, who has apparently been on a bit of a killing spree "ventilating people with shotguns and then cutting their heads off". They go on to mention that they found a headless, female corpse near by, Barton denies all knowledge of it.
When he returns to his room Barton places Charlie's box on the table next to his typewriter and suddenly he can write again. He writes continuously, ignoring the 'phone, until he's finished. To celebrate the completion of his work he goes for a dance and starts an almighty brawl with sailors and soldiers over a girl. When he returns to his room the two cops are waiting for him. Things don't look good for Barton as they've seen the massive blood stain on his mattress. As the two cops interview (read: insult) Barton the bell of the elevator sounds down the hall and Barton knows it's Charlie because it has become unbearably hot again. The cops step out into the hallway and Charlie steps out of the elevator which appears to be on fire. Charlie pulls a shotgun and blasts one of the cops in the chest, he runs up the hall screaming "LOOK UPON ME! LOOK UPON ME! I'LL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND!!", all the time fire follows him done the corridor. Bang! He blasts the other cop in the back of the leg and catches up with him and shoots him directly in the face from close range. Charlie enters Barton's room and talks to him like nothing has happened ("How you been, Buddy?), he tells Barton that the box isn't actually his and returns to his room next door. Barton gets up takes hold of his script in one hand and the box in the other and leaves the hotel.
In a meeting with Lipnick and Lou, Lipnick tells Barton that his script was terrible and that Beery was upset that the filming has to be pushed back. Barton leaves and ends up strolling along a beach. He sits down in the sand with his box beside him, when a beautiful girl sits down in fant of him and adopts the exact pose as the girl in the painting.
My thoughts: Where do I start? Barton Fink is one of the most bizarre movies I have ever seen, perhaps the most bizarre thing about it is that it gets better every time I watch it. When I first saw it, I've got to admit, I just couldn't get my head around what was happening and found it quite frustrating, but, on second viewing, I was amazed. The whole film seemed a hell of a lot better, almost a different film.
As is usual for a Coen Brother's film Barton Fink is loaded with darkly comic moments (such as the scene when Barton and Charlie wrestle in Barton's room) and it is acted excellently particularly by Turturro, Goodman and Lerner. Turturro gives the eponymous character a real sense of fragility and weakness, encouraging the viewer to feel sorry for the loner particularly when he struggling to shrug off his writer's block. Barton is obviously dedicated to his art and the plight of the common man and Turturro does a splendid job of portraying the character. No surprise then that he won the award for Best Male Performance at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival.
Goodman's character begins looking as though he's going to be a nasty piece of work and then turns out to be quite a nice, caring guy only to actually turn out to be a nasty piece of work. This is Goodman at his best in a role where the ambiguity of his definition is put across really well. It is left to the audience to decide who/what Charlie really is and what he is up to and what his goals are. He is obviously a murderer and somewhat psychotic but is there more to him that that...
Michael Lerner playing the Capitol Pictures boss, Jack Lipnick, comes across as an arrogant, greedy movie mogul who is keen to please his writers, to a point but will definitely speak his mind if he doesn't like something. He completely over-shoots everyone, particularly Lou and speaks at the speed of light. The scene where he kisses Barton's feet seems completely against character and I can't, for the life of me, work out why a man with his power would grovel like that to anyone let alone a first time movie script writer.
All of the acting is top-notch with some splendid small roles for Coen regulars Buscemi, Polito and Mahoney. Buscemi as Chet, the Hotel bell boy is excellent and seems to really fit the role. Polito as the grovelling yes-man Lou Breeze is convincing in the sense that you feel that he used to be big and has been down-trodden by Lipnick over the years they have worked together. Mahoney as W.P. Mayhew plays a drunken wash out perfectly.
The script is brilliantly written (as usual) with some truly strange characters (the lift attendant, Ben Geisler, the two police detectives, the wrestler) and some unforgettable lines, it must go down as a classic. Carter Burwell has provided a musical score that is sooo subtle you almost don't notice it but repeat viewing reveals some beautiful music that perfectly suite the mood of the movie. The sets are fantastic, particularly the Hotel Earle's rooms which really do add an air of claustrophobia to proceedings and the effect of the heat on the decor is a masterstroke. It goes without saying that the direction, right from the opening shot is pure Coen and of the usual stellar standard.
It has to be said that the film leaves you asking more questions that it provides answers. Is Audrey's head in the box? Why didn't Barton open it? If it was a head, why didn't it start to smell? Is Charlie gay and in love with Barton (hence his wrestling and the possible jealous murder of Audrey)? Is Charlie the Devil? Is the Hotel Earle Hell? I've read all of these theories and more but, I think that Charlie could well be Satan since it is always hotter when he's in the hotel and it may explain the bizarre nature of the fire in the corridor, and the Hotel Earle could be Hell in some bizarre Coen view of the Hollywood Studio system and in light of the fact that the number 6 is mentioned three times in the lift and Chet took such a long time to climb up to the reception desk from below that maybe he was coming up from Hell. Then again I could be reading more into the film than there is! Maybe the Coen Brother's were quite happy to just go with every bizarre idea they had without a thought as to what it may mean or be perceived as. Maybe it's up to the individual to decide what the hell they think is going on. Guess we'll never know...
All in all I am so glad that I gave this film a second chance and watched it with my brain turned on as it is one of the best films the Coen's have made, second only to Fargo in my book.
This black Valentine to 40s Hollywood is hugely enjoyable for the
cinema buff - style, wit and in-jokes abound in equal measure.
Barton Fink (Turturro) is a lofty leftie playwright - not unlike
Clifford Odets - lured of his noble artistic course to a Hollywood studio by big bucks
after his New York agent has reassured him that "the common man will still be here
when you get back." In a mausoleum of an L.A. hotel where everything is slightly
off-kilter, Fink attempts to meet the requirements of the philistine studio boss - played
not unlike Louis B. Mayer in a marvellous turn by Michael Lerner.
Fink promptly comes down with a serious tragi-comic attack of writer's block, his angst
and nervous deterioration paralleled by the state of his hotel room. Even more worrying is
his reluctant embroilment in the unhappy and peculiar affairs of others - a bluff, hearty,
not-what-he-appears-to-be clod in the next room (Goodman), and the
drunken Great American Writer in decline - not unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald - played by John Mahoney. Naturally there's a skirt/muse in the shape of Judy
Davies.
The allusions and illusions on display here are a pure joy until about two-thirds of the
way in, when a shocking development takes the film off into psycho-horror territory that
is almost as baffling as it is unsatisfying. No one can deny the result is, unsurprisingly
from these boys, visually enthralling - just don't ask what the heck it all means.
Angie Errigo.
Leonard Maltin Review: 2.5 stars out of 4
Self-important NY playwright Turturro comes to Hollywood in 1941 to write a screenplay, and finds it a living hell—in more ways than one. Barbed look at vintage Hollywood, filled with incredible detail and amazing scenes; told in Joel and Ethan Coen's typically flamboyant visual style. But, at a crucial point the film takes a sharp left turn toward the bizarre, and never returns. Great performances all around.
Roger Ebert Review: 3.5 stars out of 4
If there is a favorite image in the movies by the Coen brothers, it's of crass, venal men behind desks, who possess power the heroes envy. Maybe that's because, like all filmmakers, the Coens have spent a lot of time on the carpet, pitching projects to executives. In BLOOD SIMPLE, the guy behind the desk was M. Emmet Walsh, as a scheming private detective. In RAISING ARIZONA, it was Trey Wilson's furniture czar. In MILLER'S CROSSING, it was Albert Finney as a mob boss. In BARTON FINK, it is Michael Lerner, as the head of a Hollywood studio. All of these men are vulgar, smoke cigars, and view their supplicants with contempt.
To their desks come characters who want to make a deal with the devil. They know these men are evil, compromised, and corrupt. But they want what they have—a lot of money. BARTON FINK, the latest Coen film (directed by Joel, produced by Ethan, written by both) tells the story of a man who would like to sell out to Hollywood, if only he had the talent. Barton Fink is a left-wing New York playwright, modeled on the Clifford Odets of Waiting for Lefty, who writes one proletarian hand-wringer in the late 1930s and then is summoned to Hollywood, where Jack Lipnick (Lerner), the vulgarian in charge of Capitol Pictures, pays him piles of money and assigns him to write a wrestling picture for Wallace Beery.
Fink, played with a likable, dim earnestness by John Turturro, checks into an eerie hotel that looks designed by Edward Hopper. There is apparently only one other tenant, the affable Charlie Meadows (John Goodman), a traveling salesman who lives next door and says he could tell Fink a lot of interesting stories. But Fink, who claims to be the poet of the working man, is not interested in a real proletarian, and spends most of his time staring at his typewriter in despair. He has writer's block.
Lou Breeze (Jon Polito), the studio czar's right-hand man, tells Fink he should look up W.P. Mayhew (John Mahoney), another great American writer on the studio payroll. Mayhew is obviously modeled on William Faulkner, and Mahoney, with a mustache, is his uncanny double. Fink arrives breathlessly at the great man's feet, only to discover that he is a raving drunk and that his "secretary" (Judy Davis) has written most of his recent work. The three go on a picnic one day, and the scene builds into a wry comic vignette—some satire, some slapstick.
Like all of the Coen productions, BARTON FINK has a deliberate visual style. The Hollywood of the late 1930s and early 1940s is seen here as a world of Art Deco and deep shadows, long hotel corridors, and bottomless swimming pools. And there is a horror lurking underneath the affluent surface. Goodman, as the ordinary man in the next room, is revealed to have inhuman secrets, and the movie leads up to an apocalyptic vision of blood, flames, and ruin, with Barton Fink unable to influence events with either his art or his strength.
The Coens mean this aspect of the film, I think, to be read as an emblem of the rise of Nazism. They paint Fink as an ineffectual and impotent left-wing intellectual, who sells out while telling himself he is doing the right thing, who thinks he understands the "common man" but does not understand that, for many common men, fascism had a seductive appeal. Fink tries to write a wrestling picture and sleeps with the great writer's mistress, while the Holocaust approaches and the nice guy in the next room turns out to be a monster.
It would be a mistake to insist too much on this aspect of the movie, however, since BARTON FINK is above all a black comedy in the tradition of David Lynch, Luis Buńuel, and the Coens themselves. Turturro is the right man for the role, making Fink a plodding, introspective, unsure intellectual whose lack of insight is matched only by his lack of talent. The movie is a little unfair to Odets, its inspiration (even if he did go to Hollywood in the late 1930s and write a boxing picture, GOLDEN BOY, which did not drip with political commitment). But it is even more unfair, hilariously, to Faulkner, whose works were not written by a "secretary," but who was by all accounts just as much of a boozer as the Mayhew character.
BARTON FINK won the Palme d'Or at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, and an unprecedented two more prizes as well, for director and actor. Since Cannes juries traditionally limit themselves to one award per film, their ecstasy would seem to indicate BARTON FINK is one of the greatest films ever made. It is not. But it's an assured piece of comic filmmaking, and perhaps a warning by the Coens to themselves about what can happen when brilliant young talents from the East make that trek out to the land of the guys behind the desks.
CineBooks' Motion Picture Guide Review: 3.5 stars out of 5
The grand-prize winner at the , BARTON FINK is the fourth installment in the Coen brothers' series of highly stylized homages to classical Hollywood. But like their other films, BARTON FINK is a tour de force of cinematic technique that encases a quirky narrative of little depth.
Synopsis
Writer makes good. Barton Fink (John Turturro) is an earnest young New York playwright who hits it big with a Depression-era proletarian drama before being reluctantly seduced by a lucrative offer to go to Hollywood and write for the movies. Despite assurances from studio boss Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner) that he will be given free rein, Barton is asked to write a wrestling picture for Wallace Beery. Pent up in a surreal hotel room, Barton suffers acute and hallucinatory writer's block.
Barton's funk is broken by two encounters. First comes a visit from Charlie Meadows (John Goodman), a gregarious traveling salesman who immediately befriends the writer. Barton confesses his desire to write stories of the common man, but ignores the tales this Willie Loman has to tell. Next, paying a visit to the studio, he is further perplexed by the absurdities of the movie executives he watches at work. Hope returns, however, when he makes a second acquaintance. Also on the studio writing staff is the legendary W.P. Mayhew (John Mahoney), an alcoholic Southern novelist who hasn't written a word since coming to Hollywood. Barton is disillusioned when he learns that W.P. is a cynical fraud whose work is done by his personal secretary, Audrey Taylor (Judy Davis). Audrey becomes Barton's caretaker as well. Her visit to his room turns from a writing session to a sexual encounter.
Descent into hell. Barton's bliss suddenly becomes a nightmare, however, when he awakes with Audrey' bloody corpse in his bed. Charlie rescues Barton from his panic by disposing of the body, then says goodbye. A post-traumatic Barton furiously produces a screenplay in his proletarian style, but his imagined success is short-lived. The police inform him that Charlie is actually a serial killer. Just as Barton himself is about to be arrested, Charlie returns, killing the cops and leaving the shaken playwright in the midst of a blazing fire that has suddenly taken over the hotel. Barton's descent into hell concludes with his studio boss informing him that his script stinks but that he must remain indentured to the studio. The beleaguered artist winds up aimlessly wandering on the beach, where he encounters an incarnation of the nameless bathing beauty whose picture hung above his writing desk.
Critique
A send-up of Hollywood. Unlike their previous works (the film noir BLOOD SIMPLE, the screwball comedy RAISING ARIZONA, and the gangster film MILLER'S CROSSING), BARTON FINK is not a revisionist take on a classical genre but a bizarre, comic portrayal of the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s and 40s. The principal characters are clearly drawn from actual people in that system: Fink is a thinly veiled version of Clifford Odets, the leftist playwright who departed the socially committed Group Theatre in New York to write screenplays in Hollywood during WWII. And W.P. Mayhew is, of course, William Faulkner.
Lerner outstanding mogul. But the scene-stealer is Jack Lipnick, the larger-than-life movie mogul who is a composite of MGM's Louis B. Mayer and other studio heads. Michael Lerner's portrayal of Lipnick overwhelms even the fine acting of the leading players, not the least of which is Goodman's transformation from a lonely salesman into a psychotic killer. As Barton, John Turturro (DO THE RIGHT THING, MILLER'S CROSSING) can only deadpan his way amid these caricatures while careening from one baffling encounter to the next.
A hollow accomplishment. The film's period decor, mood lighting, and artful camerawork are beautiful, at times thrilling, to look at. The surrealistic writer's block scenes, in which Barton silently watches wallpaper peel and its paste ooze, are particularly memorable—imagine ERASERHEAD in color. Ultimately, however, the look, sound, and feel of this macabre comedy fail to support any coherent theme. The bombastic Philistines of Hollywood, the idealistic artists of the theater, and the "common man" are all rather cruelly skewered in the film's finely polished characterizations. Much is denigrated, but little affirmed. The film's artifice provides more than enough brilliance and dazzle, but in the end one is left asking what it all means.
Awards
BARTON FINK picked up three Academy Award nominations: Best Supporting Actor (Michael Lerner); Best Art Direction; and Best Costume Design.
(Violence, profanity, adult situations.)
