BARTON FINK
With John Turturro, John Goodman, Judy Davis, Michael Lerner, John Mahoney, Tony Shalhoub, and Jon Polito.
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The president of the Cannes jury was Roman Polanski, who took the job only after demanding that he be allowed to handpick his own jury members. Considering the indebtedness of Barton Fink to Polanski pictures like Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Tenant–in its black humor, treatment of confinement and loneliness, perverse evocations of everyday “normality,” creepy moods and hallucinatory disorientation, phantasmagoric handling of gore and other kinds of horror as shock effects, and even its careful use of ambiguous offscreen sounds–the group of awards should probably be viewed more as an act of self-congratulation than as an objective aesthetic judgment.
Nevertheless, Barton Fink is an unusually audacious movie for a major studio to release–not only because of its bizarre form and content, but also because the Coens had complete creative control. Whatever else they might mean, then, the Cannes prizes cannot be regarded as automatic nods to the commercial tried-and-true. In terms of overall meaning, Barton Fink qualifies as a genuine puzzler. Considering how transparent most commercial movies are, Barton Fink at least deserves credit for stimulating a healthy amount of discussion.
Stylistically, the movie chiefly consists of three kinds of scenes. There is entertaining if obvious satire about Hollywood vulgarians (Shalhoub–who played the cabdriver in the underrated Quick Change–and Lerner are both very funny and effective). There are extended mood pieces involving the heat, solitude, and viscousness (peeling wallpaper with running, semenlike glue) of Barton’s seedy hotel room, with frequent nods to Eraserhead as well as Polanski and many repeated, obsessive close-ups of both Barton’s portable typewriter and a tacky hand-colored photo of a bathing beauty framed over the desk. Finally, there are the scenes between Barton and Charlie, all of which occur in Barton’s room (no other room in the hotel is ever seen) and suggest a sort of sweaty homoerotic rapport somewhat reminiscent of Saul Bellow’s novel The Victim and the tortured male bonding in Miller’s Crossing.
- Hollywood producers are frauds. As indicated above, Lipnick and Geisler are hilarious, but the laughs are easily come by, and they make it difficult to see how such people could have turned out any pictures at all, much less several beautiful ones. (For whatever it’s worth, the first “Wallace Beery wrestling picture,” The Champ, was arguably one of King Vidor’s masterpieces and won Beery, who actually played a prizefighter in the film, an Oscar.) Perhaps the Coens are justified in calling attention to Hollywood bigwigs as illiterate vulgarians, but judging from an early script of Barton Fink that I happen to have read, they themselves don’t even know how to spell such words as “choir,” “playwright,” and “tragedy.” In short, the rhetorical power of commercial moviemaking, available to anyone with a few million dollars to spend, allows them a free ride over a lot of people’s corpses–Louis B. Mayer’s as well as Faulkner’s and Odets’s–a ride that made me slightly nauseous.
One way of sorting much of this out is to follow the provocative suggestion of Variety reviewer Todd McCarthy and assume that Charlie doesn’t exist at all, except as an emanation of Barton’s unconscious–the “common man” his blocked imagination is screaming for. This interpretation would make the overheard sobs (or laughs) in the next room, Charlie’s murderous impulses, and even the mysterious package Barton receives from Charlie all really emblems of Barton’s own tortured mind; significantly, Mayhew indicates that he associates the act of writing with pleasure while Barton replies that he associates it with pain. According to this scenario, Barton murders Audrey himself because he can’t bear to face the possibility of her creative mind coming to the rescue of his own on the wrestling script.
