2/5 You Can Still be Intelligent & Dislike this Movie!
  by The JuRK (Our Vast, Cultural Desert)
I originally saw BARTON FINK years ago and I just didn't get it. The Coen Brothers put out films at a fairly regular pace so it's easy to forgive them for missteps and move on. But I just watched BARTON FINK again to see if I missed anything, if there was more that I got this time.

No. Not really.

BARTON FINK never has the momentum or mastery of Billy Wilder's classic Hollywood masterpiece, SUNSET BOULEVARD. It never has the fun or focus of Woody Allen's BULLETS OVER BROADWAY, another film about a pompous East Coast playwright who learns about humility (instead of John Turturro staring--literally--at wallpaper peeling, Jon Cusack is forced to face the fact that he isn't as talented as the Mafia goon sent to keep an eye on a Mob boss's girlfriend acting in his play). The setting for this film isn't anything new, obviously, but that BARTON FINK chooses to remain so inaccessible makes it an ultimately frustrating experience.

Did John Goodman kill the girl? Why? What was in the box left in Turturro's room? What did the final shot mean? I thought this was movie about Hollywood in the 40s and then quite suddenly it's a serial murderer crime story.

The Coen Brothers can always be counted on to make visually interesting films and BARTON FINK is that. But it's also alienating and remote (and not in a good way).

And pretty slow in some sections.

5/5 Classic
  by William R. Nicholas (Mahwah, NJ USA)
Even the most avid fan of Joel and Ethan Coen can watch Batron Fink repeatedly over a lifetime and not figure the ending out. It is a funny film, but certianly not the comedy of Big Lubowski or Fargo.

A quick and inaddaqute summery: Barton Fink goes to 1941 Hollywood to write for the old studio system. He stays at a fleabag hotel, and befrineds his neighbor Charlie Munt. The morning after a trist with another writer's wife, she is found dead in his bed. He is questioned by the police, but before the crime is solved, the police are killed by Barton's neighbor.

You really need to see the film, but for those who have, let's poke at meanings of the ending. When Munt kills the detectives, he runs down the hallway, followed by flames. He bellows "I'll show you the life of the mind" when blowing the cops away with a double barrel.


Has Barton gone to hell? Certianly his enslavement by the studio system and the flames at the murder suggest that. He seeks to write for "the common man" but is trapped because he has no empathy with his intended audiance. He cannot even see the stories of those around him--in one part, Munt could have given him the whole story for the screenplay, but Barton rambles about the life of the mind. Is Munt the devil, walking Fink through hell, showing him with butchery what he is too self-involved to grasp through everyday experiance.

Look at it another way: Barton Fink is set during the Holocaust. Fink is American and Jewish, but does not seem to pick up on the anti-semitism thrown his way. Munt kills the detective, who had insulted Fink ethnically, saying "Hial Hitler." This is a dig on the cop, but it may also be a way of bringing bigotry to Fink's attention. Fink has big ambitions, but wastes them on self-agrandizment and b-movie scripts. When Munt yells "I will show you the life of the mind" while killing the police, he is really talking to Fink. Fink holds a box which most likely contains his dead lover's head, but he carries it without opening or finding out what is in there. He CHOOSES not to know. Like America during this time, Fink is too wrapped up in himself to see evil until it is in flames outside his door. When asking Munt why he picked Fink, Munt shouts "BECAUSE YOU DON'T LISTEN." Is the Hotel or the studio a concentration camp? It is rare Fink is seen outside either.

I am not this brilliant: the hell idea was mine, but the alternate holocaust theme I'll freely confess has been around for years. The filmmakers have not been forthcomming with the meaning of the ending, leaving it subjective for the audiance. But since the end of the film has events that could not happen--the spontainous fire which Munt carries with him--it is not a streach to argue that the ending takes place in Hell, Nazi Occupied Europe, Fink's mind--or in any number of places at the same time.

The common thread of possible themes is not in real time or physical space, but in Fink's self-involvement and apathy and how they return to haunt him. The Coen's have meanings here, but they are liquid meanings, that can absolutely co-exisist.

Oh yeah. Great flick.


5/5 A Lesser-Known Coen Brothers Masterpiece
  by Joshua Miller (Coeur d'Alene,ID)
The Coen Brothers' Barton Fink won the Palme D'Or at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, as well as an unprecedented two additional awards for Best Actor (John Turturro) and Best Director (Joel Coen). Later, it received 3 Academy Award nominations for it's costume design, art direction, and supporting actor Michael Lerner. Despite these achievements, Barton Fink seems be one of their lesser-known films.

It's 1941 and Barton Fink (Turturro) is rapidly becoming a successful playwright in New York for his plays about the common man. Barton is commissioned by Capitol Pictures in Los Angeles to write screenplays. Once there, he meets the head of Capitol, Jack Lipnick (Lerner), a loud, manipulative man who assigns Barton to write a wrestling picture. Settling in at the ominous Hotel Earle, Barton types one sentence and gets stuck.

John Goodman co-stars as Charlie Meadows, Barton's mysterious neighbor, a passionate insurance salesmen.

There's a lot more to the story than meets the eye, but I think it's best not to divulge any more information about the story. This is one of the strangest films in the Coen Brothers cannon. The Coens tend to tackle more than one genre in all of their films, but the balancing act they do here is very impressive. Barton Fink sometimes feels like a comedy, sometimes a drama, sometimes a period piece, and sometimes even a horror movie.

Hitchcock would've been proud of the Hotel Earle with it's peeling wallpaper, somber atmosphere, and the way the bellhop Chet (Steve Buscemi), a sinister-looking little man, appears from a trap door.

Even with no linear genre, Barton Fink never feels convoluted...Although not everyone will love it.

The performances are all terrific. Turturro gives a spirited performance that is unlike any role I've seen him play. This man is a chameleon and Fink is one of his most memorable performances. Goodman has always been known for comedic performances, but this performance shows a much better actor than his reputation suggests. Charlie is a complicated character to say the least.

As for the supporting roles; Lerner and Tony Shalhoub are perfect; Lerner received the only Oscar nomination in the acting category and he's brilliant. Lipnick is one of those roles that likely seemed like nothing special on paper that certain actors will knock out of the park. Lipnick does just that. Shalhoub does the same thing. They play these character's so well, they seem plucked directly from this era.

Barton Fink is a one-of-a-kind movie with great performances, memorable characters, and perfect dialogue. The scene of two detectives from the LAPD engaging in rapid-fire banter late in the film is nothing short of pure gold. Atmospheric and entertaining, this nothing-less-than-unique movie is yet another masterpiece courtesy of the Coen Brothers.

GRADE: A

4/5 EVERYBODY WRITES ABOUT HOLLYWOOD, BUT EVER TRIED TO LIVE IN SCHOLEM ALECHEM-LAND?
  by Josef Bush (Phoenix, AZ)
If it works for you its a financial paradise. If it doesn't, its a culturalloy desolate and desolating carnival of sunshine, depravity and decay. You can't have it both ways. But the truth is, Hollywood is not only what it is; that is to say a movie-biz carney town, but a metropolitan entity of mythological dimension. Like Venice, it's improbable; both flashy and shabby, simultaneously. And it too stinks. But...

In BARTON FINK Hollywood is one of the central characters of the story. And the story, proceeding out of Barton's persona, his east-coast, Jesish/Communist up-bringing and moralistic view, has a palpable middle-european flavor. It's much like a Dostoyevski or a Scholem Aleichem story, both grippingly funny, god-haunted, and hideous. BF has elements of self-parody in it too, and glibly displays that form of self-hatred possessing some Jews, who refer to themselves, in private, as Kikes. A throwback to the Ellis Island experience when immigrant Polish/Russian Jews unable to read and write English, refused to "make their mark" on a form with a cross (for reasons not obvious to the goyem) but instead chose to mark their forms with a circle, or Kikle, and became -- with their decendants -- forever Kikes. And this wonderful nugget of self-identification and self-loathing is part and parcel of what is the movie business, a Jewish business, within, for and surrounded by a population of white or anglo-saxon gentiles it simultaneously employs and entertains, who not only hate them, but (in the war-time era) segregates them, legally, in housing and everywhere else.

NOSTALGIA: I guess I was about 12 when looking through the Chicago Tribune want ads one Sunday, I asked my mother about something, some phrase I kept coming across. It was something like "Non-christians need not apply." What's it mean? She said, "No Jews."

Well, BF takes place in or around 1941, so the time is about right. It's Segregated Hollywood. And there's Barton, with his kinky pompadour and Andre Gide Socialist spectacles jitterbugging at the USO with a pretty shikseh. A social idealist, hired to do a Wallace Beery wrestling picture. Nu?

Listen to me: This is a picture that will break your heart if you haven't sold out already!


4/5 A Real Cast of Characters
  by Randy Keehn (Williston, ND United States)
I really didn't know what to expect when I rented "Barton Fink" but it wasn't long before I found myself drawn into the movie. The plot has some unusual twists and turns but the thing I came away with was the characters that emerge from the film. John Goodman certainly was one of the top characters in the movie but also noteworthy are the Movie Mogul, the writer (a cross between, I believe, F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner), the secretary, all the way down to a couple of hard-boiled cops. I couldn't get enough of these zany personalities that create a circus of insanity around our otherwise stuffy "hero". It gets crazy at times but it works.