Leonard Maltin Review: 2.5 stars out of 4

Roger Ebert Review: 3.0 stars out of 4

The room. I keep thinking about the room. The office from which Leo pulls the strings that control the city. Leo, played by Albert Finney, is a large, strong man in late middle-age, and he lacks confidence in only one area. He is not sure he can count on the love of Verna, the young dame he's fallen for. That causes him to hesitate when he knows that Verna's brother, Bernie, should be rubbed out. He doesn't want to lose Verna. And his hesitation brings the city's whole criminal framework crashing down in blood and violence.

But I think about the room. What a wonderful room. All steeped in dark shadows, with expensive antique oak furniture and leather chairs and brass fittings and vast spaces of flooring between the yellow pools of light. I would like to work in this room. A man could get something done in this room. And yet the room is a key to why MILLER'S CROSSING is not quite as successful as it should be—why it seems like a movie that is constantly aware of itself, instead of a movie that gets on with business.

I do not really think that Leo would have such an office. I believe it is the kind of office that would be created by a good interior designer with contacts in England, and supplied to a rich lawyer. I am not sure a rackets boss in a big American city in 1929 would occupy such a space, even though it does set him off as a sinister presence among the shadows.

I am also not sure that the other characters in this movie would inhabit quite the same clothing, accents, haircuts, and dwellings as we see them in. This doesn't look like a gangster movie, it looks like a commercial intended to look like a gangster movie. Everything is too designed. That goes for the plot and the dialogue, too. The dialogue is well-written, but it is indeed written. We admire the prose rather than the message. People make threats, and we think about how elegantly the threats are worded.

MILLER'S CROSSING comes from two traditions that sometimes overlap: the gangster movie of the 1930s and the film noir of the 1940s. It finds its characters in the first and its visual style in the second, but the visuals lack a certain stylish tackiness that film noir often had. They're in good taste. The plot is as simple as an old gangster movie, but it takes us a long time to figure that out, because the first thirty minutes of the film involve the characters in complicated dialogue where they talk about a lot of people we haven't met, and refer to a lot of possibilities we don't understand. It's the kind of movie you have to figure out in hindsight.

Don't get me wrong. There is a lot here to admire. Albert Finney is especially good as Leo, the crime boss, and Jon Polito was wonderful as Johnny Caspar, his rival, who keeps talking about "business ethics." One of the most interesting characters in the movie is Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro), a two-timing bookie who pleads for his life in a monologue that he somehow keeps afloat long past any plausible dramatic length.

MILLER'S CROSSING is a complex, daring gangster film that takes place in a world artificially constructed largely from the mythology of other movies, but whose seamless internal structure contains a unique veracity.

Synopsis

Gang tensions. A gang war is brewing. The Irish run the town, led by tough but sentimental Leo (Albert Finney) and his acerbic right-hand man, Tom (Gabriel Byrne). The Italians are the new kids on the block, and they're sensitive about it.

Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito) is particularly thin-skinned, and he's mad as hell because small-time chiseler Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro) is cutting in on his gambling action ("It's getting so a man can't trust a fixed fight anymore," Caspar complains). He wants Bernie killed, but Leo—who, by all rights, should acquiesce to keep the peace—won't hear of it because he's promised Bernie's tough-as-nails sister, Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), that he'll look out for her brother. Verna is the love of Leo's life, but she's also sleeping with Tom.

A falling out. It's a volatile situation, to say the least. Caspar's chief lieutenant, the sociopathic Eddie Dane (J.E. Freeman), is itching for a fight. Meanwhile, Tom, a drinker and gambler, is deeply in debt to his bookie, who's putting the screws to him. When Leo and Leo have a falling out over Verna, Tom offers his services to Caspar.

Double crosses. Forced to prove his loyalty by killing Bernie, Tom fakes the murder, only to have Bernie prove himself to be the scum of the earth by turning around and trying to blackmail Tom. A full-scale war erupts, Leo is toppled, and double crosses are the order of the day. It all comes out more or less right in the end: Tom engineers Bernie's and Caspar's deaths, Leo is returned to power, Verna goes back to him, and peace and order are restored.

Critique

Stylishly produced. The plot isn't the main event in MILLER'S CROSSING it's clever enough, but this ground has been covered before. Gangs, guns, booze, and broads—they are all gangster film clichés. But MILLER'S CROSSING is anything but clichéd. The third film by brothers Joel Coen and Ethan Coen (Joel directs, Ethan produces, they both write) is a remarkable advance over their first two efforts, BLOOD SIMPLE (1984) and RAISING ARIZONA (1987).

Though the nature of the ir style changes from film to film, the Coens are consistently stylish: BLOOD SIMPLE was noirer than noir; RAISING ARIZONA gave new meaning to the term larger than life. MILLER'S CROSSING is no exception. Richly colored and painstakingly composed (the film was shot by Barry Sonnenfeld), its images are punchy without being cartoonish.

Faithfully offered. What differentiates MILLER'S CROSSING from the Coens' first two films is its astonishing emotional complexity. Neither less witty nor less ironic than the Coens' earlier films, it resonates long after the novelty of its presentation has worn off. MILLER'S CROSSING tackles big issues—the nature of love, loyalty, friendship, and responsibility—without putting any of them in the foreground. Never does the film resort to didacticism. Still more surprising, the Coens resisted the Hollywood dictum that the protagonist must be sympathetic (that is, better than the rest of us—no messy moral complexities allowed).

Byrne's Tom is a man of principles, smart, loyal, and willing to gratify his own ambitions through Leo. But he's also a drunk, and he gambles compulsively. What's more, he sleeps with Verna and murders her brother. Tom has his reasons, and they're eminently reasonable, but what's remarkable is that the Coens trust their audience to understand him.

They also assume moviegoers can follow a fairly convoluted plot devoid of deadening expository interludes designed to bring everyone up to speed, and they proceed from a position of absolute confidence in the evocative power of language.

Expertly constructed. After opening in the woods, with a man's fedora swirling in the breeze, the film cuts to a lengthy scene in which Caspar propounds his self-serving theory of ethics. A study in contrast—between silence and sound, light-filled woods and darkened rooms, action and verbiage—these two scenes introduce the film's major themes with an economy and style that the Coens maintain throughout the film.

Several contemporary filmmakers are capable of constructing a movie this well—Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, and Terrence Malick come to mind—but none of them can do it better. And the Coens have so far proved consistent as well.