Review of Barton Fink (1991) by Xgary X — 12 Jul 2011

A Broadway playwright relocates to Hollywood and suffers writer's block while enduring the attentions of an affable but mysterious insurance salesman who lives next door. Barton Fink is an odd fish, even by the off beat standards of the Coen brothers.

It's actually quite difficult to differentiate the "real" from the surreal and the seedy motel in which he finds himself creates a deeply eerie atmosphere. Loaded with symbolism, the story doesn't really have a "beginning", "middle" or "end", the Coens even mocking both the base formula of low brow culture as well as the pretentiousness and self importance of men like Fink who fancy themselves as champions of the people but are in fact egoists with little respect for the "common man" they condescendingly claim to represent.

Turturro puts in probably his finest performance as the deluded wordsmith and Goodman is as brilliant as always as the foil for his self absorbed rants. Darkly comic, bleak and surreal, Barton Fink blurs the line between fantasy and reality making for a bizarre but fascinating character study and comment on popular culture that's more about the evocative than the narrative.