Barton Fink
This is another one of those films from the Loris list. I am trying to see everything he’s mentioning, though it is getting increasingly hard. Especially with his French movies I tend to get afraid they are too… intellectual? I shouldn’t have that problem with Coen films though. They might be intellectual, but at least not the French way.
So Loris really liked “Barton Fink”, and said it was better than “Miller’s Crossing” and “Blood Simple”. As for me, I can’t see a Coen film without comparing it to “The Big Lebowski”, which was the kind of film that practically had everything: A great set of characters, an engaging story, cult elements such as the White Russian and finally some commentary on human existence, friendship, work or death. “Barton Fink” has a lot of this too, but in general the two films cannot be compared at all.
There is so much in the film, and it’s so much more difficult to talk about it, because it’s less direct as in, say, “The Darjeeling Limited”. It’s not just about some writer having problems writing, it’s about what he sees in the world, the dichotomy between theatre and film, or rather the protagonist’s view of these two worlds. On top of that, there is the process of writing itself, the second protagonist who is something entirely different from Barton Fink himself, yet reflects Barton Fink’s incapability of writing or even associating with ‘the common man’. Needless to say, the dialogue is absolutely awesome. On top of that, Barton Fink has an impressive cinematography and atmosphere which I am often missing from later Coen works. After seeing “Repulsion” recently, I totally see the similarity to Polanski’s films, and it definitely suits the Coens’s style. Even the shock moments à la Kubrick totally caught me off guard.
I think I am understanding the friendship between Barton Fink and Charlie a little bit. Charlie is ultimately the character who was truly alone, and unable to find a friend in Barton. At the same time, he doesn’t entirely hate Barton considering that he ended up sparing his life. Perhaps this very short friendship is not so easy to get behind after all, but Turturro and Goodman are making it possible to portray such a complex relationship in a believable way.
Every film by the Coens is great, or rather it’s easy to assume that. Perhaps I should rather say that “Barton Fink” perfectly met my high expectations of a Coen film. We’ll see how “Miller’s Crossing” and “Blood Simple” will do.