![]() ![]() It’s temping to chock the Coens’ filmic vision up to their projection of Hollywood as a place of creeping oppression, a land that capitalizes on artistic ingenuity only to codify and market it for the masses, and while the Coens certainly take the piss out of the film industry, their vision for “Barton Fink” is much more the externalization of Barton’s nightmarish internal landscape. It’s not any specific juxtapositions or deliberate arrhythmia, but it’s just a steady atonality that allows for a tender sex scene to transition to a trip down the bathroom drain to a horrifying bloody spectre without ever once feeling forced or showy. But on top of all that, it’s the Coens editing rhythms that make the audience feel like they’re sitting on a piece of driftwood while the water slowly drains from underneath them. Then, there’s Roger Deakins’ dreary cinematography, which extends even to the sun-drenched Hollywood exteriors, that recall the best of “The Shining” and “Eraserhead,” a sort of infinite plane of creeping, crippling terror that hardly ever shows its face, but makes its presence known. ![]() Skip Lievsay’s eerie sound design coupled with Carter Burwell’s score almost immediately puts the audience at unease, packing the aural walls not only with strings, but with murmurs, phone calls, ringing bells, screams, guttural cries, humming, peeling wallpaper, and just about everything but silence to create the feeling of a world that’s slowly falling apart. The first thing that stands out in “Barton Fink” is the sound. It achieves this by laying down an ineffable sense of foreboding, as if at any moment something truly terrible and shocking can help (and it does). In “Barton Fink,” the Coens present a vision of Hell that at first resembles the real world but soon becomes its own living, breathing organism. As Barton struggles to write his screenplay, the world around him turns more menacing and phantasmagoric, providing Barton with the ultimate lesson on what it means to really explore the life of the mind. Barton’s only source of comfort is his next door neighbor Charlie Meadows ( John Goodman, in arguably his greatest film performance), a traveling insurance salesman whom Barton believes is the embodiment of his “common man” pretensions, but is secretly a much more sinister figure. Mayhew (John Mahoney), Barton feels less comfortable than ever with his new place in the Hollywood studio system, an institution mostly interested in profits than artistic success, despite claims to the contrary, and that entraps writers to churn out work at a satisfying rate. After meeting producer Ben Geisler (Tony Shaloub) and acclaimed novelist-turned-screenwriter-turned-drunk W.P. He meets with Capitol Pictures head Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner) who puts him to work on a wrestling picture despite Barton’s lack of knowledge about the genre or what’s expected of him. ![]() Set in 1941, acclaimed New York playwright Barton Fink ( John Turturro) moves to Hollywood to write scripts for Capitol Pictures despite his fears of separating himself from the “common man.” He checks into the Hotel Earle, an expansive, yet strangely desolate building filled with sparse rooms, drab walls, mosquitos, and the unrelenting noise of the world around Barton. Roger Deakins Thinks ‘Kundun’ Is Scorsese’s Best Movie: ‘It’s a Tone Poem’ “Barton Fink” is a surrealistic journey into the life of the mind, a disturbing externalization of an internal struggle that’s one of the Coens’ all-time best works. It assumes multiple genres - period drama, buddy comedy, surrealist horror, Hollywood satire - without ever working within them it removes the comfortable floor from underneath the audience at every turn, not by being outrageously unpredictable but through a sustained feeling of dread that creates an air of unpredictability it owes debts to the films of Polanski, Lynch, Kubrick, and even Sturges, but it’s entirely a Coen Brothers vision. ![]() The Coen Brothers’ fourth film “ Barton Fink” is offbeat in every sense of the word. But a truly offbeat film works against traditional, established filmic rhythms, with a palpable feeling of going against the grain but never foregrounding that quality as its primary trait. A typically offbeat film, for example, tends to be filled with stylistic quirks, or a self-conscious narrative, or dare I say, “wacky” characters whose wackiness is their primary appeal. Though the term “offbeat” is synonymous with “unconventional” or “unusual,” there are nevertheless certain expectations that come with that label. This is the Criticwire Classic of the Week. Every now and then on the Criticwire Network an older film gets singled out for attention. ![]()
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