Tagline: “Between Heaven and Hell There's Always Hollywood! “
This Coen Brothers film is a fabulous black comedy with some very dark depths to be plumbed. In 1941, the serious, intellectual playwright Barton Fink, played goofily by John Turturro, has a very successful play in New York with his theatre for the common man, for everybody. He accepts an offer from Hollywood and arrives in Los Angeles to be told that he must write a wrestling movie for Wallace Beery. He sees this as beneath him and gets serious writers block.
An atmosphere of almost surreal strangeness persists from start to end: the opening shot is a slow zoom towards some fading wallpaper. I was reminded strongly of the film Delicatessen by several sequences and the overall ambience of dampness and decay. Barton’s LA hotel is dreadful. The wallpaper literally peels off the walls and when he attempts to put it back in place, he gets slime all over his hands (and this matches well the slimy Hollywood people we meet later). The bedspread is faded, the windows won‘t open and there is a mosquito buzzing round his room.
As with many of his films John Goodman steals it, playing a larger than life insurance salesman. He is in the room next to Barton’s and when they meet, Barton tells him of his writer’s block. Goodman attempts to tell him stories from real life, from a common man. 3 times he tries, but on each occasion Barton talks over him and doesn’t listen. This is one of the themes of the film: Barton thinks he can describe the life of everyday folk just by thinking about it, and he is of course wrong. “The life of the mind” as he puts it, and this phrase comes back terrifyingly from Goodman at the end of the film. But it goes deeper than that: Barton doesn’t really want to know about the common man and doesn’t want to know about the world. He’s not interested in Goodman and all that seethes beneath his surface and he never even opens the approximately head-sized box he is presented with: he is uncurious and that is no way for a writer to be. The tale takes a very dark turn towards the end, with Goodman’s character turning out to be something far worse than a simple insurance salesman.
The cinematography is excellent and the scenes inside the hotel in particular are beautifully done. Brown tones dominate and the whole has a feeling of seediness, rot and dereliction. The camera doesn’t move much, but zooms slowly giving a calm feeling to the proceedings. Every performance is note perfect.
Three types of writers come in for great criticism from this film: playwrights, film writers and authors. Authors are represented by John Mahoney brilliantly playing a constantly soused author and his lover/assistant Judy Davis who actually writes his books for him. As well as writers, Hollywood is ripped to pieces by this film. The bosses he meets are loud, brash, rude and only interested in money. They shout, badger and bully and appear to completely lack sensitivity, and they are played to perfection by those who clearly know the people they are portraying. Michael Lerner in particular is excellent.
The tagline at the top was carefully chosen, but the hellishness should be taken allegorically rather than literally. This film is really about different sorts of hell, including but not limited to these:
Fink’s personal hell inside his own mind where he wrestles with his own “inner demons“.
The hell that is Hollywood
The hell that is the lives of normal people
Nazism
The creative writing process
Socialism
Murder
It isn’t all laid out on a plate for the viewer. There are symbols galore and we can each choose what to make of them.
But this film is flawed. It drags a little in places, the characters are over-stereotyped, and if I’m being completely honest there are too many sub-themes that go nowhere, too many hints about what might be that aren’t explored and could have been left out and as a result it feels laboured. But it is funny, well-acted, surprising and always looks excellent. But if you want a straight, simple story, this is not the film for you.
Cheers, Tom.
