36) Barton FinkDirector: Joel and Ethan CoenYear: 1991Plot Summary: In 1941, New York intellectual playwright Barton Fink comes to Hollywood to write a Wallace Beery wrestling picture. Staying in the eerie Hotel Earle, Barton develops severe writer's block. His neighbor, jovial insurance salesman Charlie Meadows, tries to help, but Barton continues to struggle as a bizarre sequence of events distracts him even further from his task.
Barton Fink is one of those films that is just so difficult to review. It refuses to fit into one genre, it's so ambiguous that there isn't one simple explanation for the events that occur in the movie and it's so brilliantly clever that no words could justify it.
I disliked the film on first viewing for some of those reasons, but watching it again and again it's impossible not to be astounded by what the Coen Brothers have created here. It's so unlike anything that has been made before and will leave you pondering the movie's events, symbolism and, well, just what the hell it all meant for weeks after the credits roll. This is their greatest talent: They constantly create movies that, as well as being thoroughly entertaining, are like a riddle you can't shake out of your head until it's answered. Only most of their movies don't have an answer.
Is it a film about Hollywood? The contrast of the way Broadway and Hollywood are presented certainly makes you think that Barton Fink is the Coen's attack at the mainstream film industry. Not to mention that they use a lot of symbolism that compares the Hollywood in the film to slavery. Is it a film simply about the 1940s? After all, there seems to be subtle references to World War II and the conflict between the Nazis and the Jews. Or is it a film about writing? The entire narrative seems to somehow represent the process of writing and highlights the irony in a lot of literature. I'm sure everyone who watches it sees something entirely different.
Barton Fink's style and tone falls somewhere between a Roman Polanski like horror movie, a buddy comedy and a satire of 1940s Hollywood. One minute, Barton Fink is creepy with the peeling wallpaper oozing with paste, the eerie green and brown art deco, and the haunting buzzing of the mosquito. The next, you're thrown into a studio head's office in a scene full of humour. But somehow, it all works. Even when the hotel Fink spends much of the film in bursts into flames and his next door neighbour seemingly reveals himself as the devil - one character mentions how hot it is when he arrives - it never feels out of the context of the film. How on earth the Coen's can do this I don't know.
Barton Fink is exactly what film-making should be: Daring, unconventional, unique, artistic, intelligent and thought-provoking.
4/5
2 comments:
It's in or close to my top 20 of all-time. I remember after I saw Burn After Reading, I watched a lot of Coen, I rewatched this after giving it 9/10 then sinking to 7/10 over time and instantly jolted to top 20, then I had to rewatch it again the next day. I haven't since because my £2 DVD is barely worth watching on a big TV, which is what I want to do. Need to get the blu-ray so I can properly articulate my thoughts.
Either way, along with Adaptation, it's the reason why my career path is either going to be screenwriter or struggling screenwriter. :)
I've still yet to make the transition to blu-ray. How much better is it? :)
Really? Of all the movies that might want you to write, it's weird that you got that effect from Barton Fink! Haha. I thought run ins with the FBI, the devil and selfish Hollywood types would put you off. :P Haha.
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