Between Heaven and Hell There's Always Hollywood!
What a strange unsettling film, in tone, like a Mervyn Peake gothic fantasy novel, full of strange, compelling, appalling, disgusting details.
In 1941, a New York playwright, the eponymous Barton Fink (John Turturro), following his first major theatrical success, goes to Hollywood to begin writing under contract "for the pictures". He moves into a room at a downbeat hotel, Hotel Earle, and, in the sweltering heat, sets up his typewriter. He is asked to write "a simple wrestling picture" vehicle for the actor Wallace Beery (a real actor of the time, who we understandably never see) but appearing to have virtually no knowledge or experience of the movies, suffers from writer's block, and struggles to get past the opening paragraph.
He becomes distracted by noises from other rooms, including that of his immediate neighbour, travelling insurance salesman Charlie Meadows (John Goodman), a cheery if slightly troubled character, and features within his room, including the wallpaper, and a photo of a girl in a bikini, with her back to us, on a beach. Essentially, he seems to fall into a trance in which details of people, objects and events take on a hallucinogenically mesmerising intensity, which the Coen brothers brilliantly convey.
Apart from his neighbour, and a permanently quizzical hotel employee, Chet (Steve Buscemi), he meets a handful of strange Hollywood executives including his employer, the larger-than-life head of Capitol Pictures, Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner) and his grovelling assistant, Lou Breeze (Jon Polito), and the film's producer, Ben Geisler (Tony Shalhoub), who sends him for advice to a legendary but aggressively alcoholic older writer, W.P. "Bill" Mayhew (John Mahoney), and his alluring secretary, Audrey Taylor (Judy Davis), who, along with Fink's neighbour, Charlie, pass for the nearest thing to normal in this distorted world.
Fink is an odd but sympathetic character, clearly driven by good intentions. He waxes lyrical in defence of "the common man", but more in the abstract than in the flesh, ironically but endearingly turning a deaf ear to the travails of actual working class people such as his neighbour, Charlie.
As distractions mount and deadlines loom, the fulcrum on which this story turns is the question of whether or not Fink will be able to meet his contractual duties and come up with an acceptable script.
The film is not comfortable viewing but compelling. There are stretches where the action drags a bit, but there are also some very dramatic stretches. Overall, it is a fine externalisation of the internal landscape of psychosis or mental breakdown, roughly parable in theme and scope to 2011's "Take Shelter", where Michael Shannon's protagonist wrestles with a similar rupture in the barrier separating fantasy from reality.
The cast is uniformly excellent, notably Turturro in the central role (two years later shining in a quite different supporting role in the Coen brothers' The Big Lebowski, 1993), Goodman as the good-naturedly supportive if troubled "regular guy", and Lerner as the archetypal Hollywood executive.
Not one of my favourite Coen brothers' films, but on repeat viewing, a very creditable work.
- Directors: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
- Writers: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
- Starring: John Turturro, John Goodman, Michael Lerner, Judy Davis, John Mahoney, Steve Buscemi, Tony Shalhoub, Jon Polito, Steve Buscemi
- Rating: Full price
- When seen: 10 Apr 2012
- Where seen: Home
- More information: IMDB | RottenTomatoes | Wikipedia
Written in WriteRoom, formatted using HyperEdit, posted from my MacBook Pro
