TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/082691/0826420.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.2 KB | 178 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 58

A Three-Espresso Hallucination


Audacious, difficult -- all right, weird -- Barton Fink confirms
the status of the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, as distinctive
postmodern film artists

By RICHARD SCHICKEL -- With reporting by Janice C. Simpson/
New York


    You're going to be hearing a lot about Barton Fink in the
next few weeks. Gnomic, claustrophobic, hallucinatory, just
plain weird, it is the kind of movie critics can soak up
thousands of words analyzing and cinephiles can soak up at least
three espressos arguing their way through.

    It is, as well, the first film to accomplish the hat trick
at the Cannes festival (best picture, best director and best
actor), and we all understand, don't we, that when it comes to
our own movies, the French always know what's best for -- and
by -- us American primitives.

    Finally, it is the work of two brothers, Joel and Ethan
Coen, who have, professionally speaking, rolled themselves into
a single, significant auteur in the course of just seven years
and four films, in the process developing cult and critical
followings of large and vociferous proportions.

    In other words, intrinsically problematic as Barton Fink
is, it is good copy, especially in August, when scarcely an
interesting creature is stirring in the theaters. Whether or not
it is likely to prove good box office is quite another, if
equally problematic, matter. For this is Terminhood season, and
one has to wonder: Do a profitably large number of American
citizens, out for a good time, or at best a conventionally
inspirational one, really want to see a movie that is
essentially about a man sitting in a hotel room suffering a
monumental writer's block in Hollywood a half-century ago?

    The answer is almost certainly no. This is not, putting it
mildly, a subject of wide or particularly pressing current
interest. Barton Fink's capacity for spiritual uplift is nil,
and though the plight of the eponymous scrivener is often
bleakly funny, we are not talking Hot Shots! here. In fact, with
its long passages in which, literally, we are invited to watch
nothing more stirring than paper peeling off the walls (or not
moving through Barton's typewriter), the movie may challenge the
faith of even the most loyal Coenheads.

    But it will never shatter that faith beyond repair. For
even when its narrative stalls and its dialogue stammers
incoherently, the picture seems at worst a necessary mistake for
its creators. At its best, and especially considered in the
light of the Coens' previous ventures, Barton Fink seems both
marvelously audacious and quite inevitable.

    The Coens' earlier films, like those of many young
filmmakers, worked out of, and off of, the American genre
tradition. Blood Simple was a film noir, Raising Arizona a
screwball comedy of sorts and Miller's Crossing, which was
probably 1990's best movie, a reanimation of the classic
gangster dramas of the 1930s. But these movies were not
send-ups, rip-offs or slavish homages. Each was, instead, a
dark, devious and witty reinvention of whatever inspired it.
Barton Fink is, in this context, a logical next step. Evoking
no particular genre, it is nothing less than a shrewdly perverse
gloss on the darkly romantic (and wildly oversimplified)
dialectic by which people have for ages tried -- and failed --
to understand how the whole movie enterprise works.

    As this story is traditionally told, Hollywood is the
great corrupter of innocent talent, luring it away from
righteousness with false promises of easy money for easy work,
then blunting and eventually ruining it with vulgar values and
stupefying assignments. In the Coens' revision of this legend,
their title character (John Turturro, quite correctly a Coen
favorite) is a proletarian playwright who calls to mind that
real-life theatrical leftist Clifford Odets. Working on a
wrestling picture at the behest of a studio boss (Michael
Lerner) straight out of every literary intellectual's
nightmares, and turning for advice to drunken, softly cynical
W.P. Mayhew (John Mahoney), a figure unmistakably inspired by
William Faulkner, Barton is neither a heroic symbol of
resistance to materialism nor a sympathetic victim. He's just
kind of a jerk.

    Historically Odets is usually seen as the great cautionary
example of what Hollywood can do to a principled artist. But as
the Coens reimagine the type, it is actually his unexamined
political principles that undo him, not Hollywood crassness.
Believing not wisely but entirely too well that all virtue
resides in the common man, he befriends Charlie Meadows (John
Goodman), his next-door neighbor in the hotel, who could not be
more genially common -- nor better played. Goodman's sunny
menace sheds a glorious crosslight on Turturro's superb
performance as an almost perfectly unattractive man, at once
arrogant and self-effacing, politically articulate yet incapable
of ordinary human connections.

    Anyone else but Barton might have read the danger signals
Meadows sends forth, might have guessed at the murderous madness
beneath his bonhomie. When, eventually, Meadows strikes
perilously close to Barton, and the writer finally asks why, he
gets a chilling answer that contains, perhaps, the entire moral
of the movie. "Because you don't listen," Meadows says. This is,
of course, precisely the problem with people who substitute
grand ideological fantasies for clear and realistic observation
of the world.

    The Coens, who themselves like to play boyish innocence,
are in fact odd ducks, not least in their symbiotic closeness.
In conversation they have a slightly spooky habit of finishing
each other's sentences. "You're only working with one boss,"
says Barry Sonnenfeld, the cinematographer of their first three
films. "He just happens to be in two bodies." In their
compulsively careful (and frugal) working methods, the Coens are
as alienated from contemporary Hollywood as their protagonist
is from the old-time movie colony. Growing up in a Minneapolis
suburb, the sons of university teachers, they made little
super-8 parodies of the movies they saw on TV before going their
separate ways for a while -- Joel, now 35, to study film at New
York University and start a career as editor of low-budget
features, Ethan, now 32, to major in philosophy at Princeton.
It may be that the former's intelligence is the more cinematic,
the latter's the more literary, but only they know for certain
the details of their collaboration.

    And they're not telling. On all their films Joel is
credited as the director, Ethan as the producer and both as
screenwriters; but it is hard to tell where one leaves off and
the other begins. Nor will they discuss the quite separate
private lives they lead when they leave the Manhattan studio
apartment where they meet every day to write and storyboard
their films. They also refuse to lay out the meanings of their
films or make any large moral claims for them. They say the
Barton Fink script arose in part out of a writing block of their
own, in part out of a desire to write a good role for their pal
Turturro, in part because, in Ethan's words, "we started
thinking about a big empty hotel." As he says of these various
elements, "Who knows quite how they go together or what
precipitates what?" To say more than that, adds Joel, "is just
not appealing to us in any way."

    Indeed, their dreamlike realization of their script,
though often imagistically striking, deliberately subverts their
message and all too often alienates the viewer. You get the
feeling that visually they are purposely, maybe even
maliciously, messing with our heads instead of informing us. But
whether they admit it or not -- and it's not something anyone
who needs mainstream financing is likely to own up to -- the
Coens are palpably, self-consciously postmodern artists, and
that sets them apart from almost everybody else making
theatrical films in America today. They are therefore entitled
to patience, respect and, yes, perhaps a special gratitude for
this movie, which never once compromises its fundamentally
unpromising yet courageously aspiring nature.