Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Barton Fink


This 1991 surrealist drama swept the board at Cannes that year, winning the Palme d'Or as well as awards for best director and best actor. Despite this, it remains one of the Coen Brothers less known pictures, as indeed do all of their films before Fargo.

The chameleonic (and impossibly faceless) John Turturro is brilliant as the titular playwright who (perhaps literally) sells his soul to Hollywood in 1941. After achieving critical success in his native New York with a social realist play about fishmongers, he moves to Hollywood and is immediately set to work on a demeaning B-movie about wrestling. Nonetheless, writer's block sets in, and as he imprisons himself in a run-down hotel and attempts to connect with "the common man", the only people he encounters are the twitchy "Chet" (Steve Buscemi), the receptionist, and his unnerving neighbour, played with disturbing amiability by John Goodman.

Stylistically owing a huge debt to David Lynch's Eraserhead (from the industrial drone of the hotel down to John Turturro's hairstyle), the film can be read in any number of ways - vitriolic satire on Hollywood; character study of writer's block; blackly comic analysis of Nazi influence in the 1940s; even a twisted take on the biblical (or perhaps Satanic) epic. Crammed full of inventive and frequently nightmarish ideas - the wallpaper in Fink's room slowly peeling down to reveal a worrying flesh underneath - the film bravely moves into less familiar territory in its second act, and provides one of the most stunning, if perplexing, finales I have seen in some time.
4/5