For all their genre-hopping, the films of the Coen brothers fall roughly into two categories. The first are the comedies: films like RAISING ARIZONA, O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU, and THE BIG LEBOWSKI, all broad and quirkily stilted, but with an undercurrent of darkness and melancholy. The others, for lack of a better term, can be described as “nightmare pictures”. In these films the ratio is reversed: the humor is there, but it becomes an instrument of torment for the Coens’ hapless everymen, trapped in unwinnable situations frequently of their own design.
While FARGO is the most appealing of the Coen’s nightmares and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is the scariest, none are as purely nightmarish as BARTON FINK. Ostensibly the story of an acclaimed playwright lured to 1940s Hollywood to write screenplays for cheap B-movies, BARTON FINK largely serves as a manifestation of the existential dread that can accompany writer’s block (the brothers reportedly wrote the film as therapy to overcome their own blocks while writing MILLER’S CROSSING). The hotel he checks into becomes his own personal purgatory, with constantly buzzing flies, mysterious stains on the walls, and a jovial neighbor (played by Coen stalwart John Goodman) who may or may not be a monster. Again, the trademark impish humor is present, as in the cruel repetition of Fink’s pitiable one line of screenplay, but the film represents the Coens’ furthest exploration into full-bore surrealism – that hairdo isn’t the only thing Fink has in common with ERASERHEAD’s Henry Spencer. It’s also the first film to win Best Picture, Director, AND Actor at the Cannes Film Festival. All this is to say that BARTON FINK is one of the most singular films by one of the most singular teams in movie history, and not to be missed.
BARTON FINK
Thursday, December 12, 4:30 PM, 7:00 PM
Brattle Theatre (40 Brattle St, Cambridge, MA 02138)
$10 ($8 for matinee)