Review of Barton Fink (1991) by Kenneth L — 12 Jul 2010

Another dark, funny, sick joke from the Coen brothers. This one has a similar basic structure to their recent A Serious Man: it's about a nice but unexceptional man struggling vainly to deal with a series of baffling circumstances.

This time it's John Turturro as Barton Fink, an earnest young liberal playwright in the 1930s who gets hired by Hollywood to write a B-movie. He believes his writing can help the proletarian "common man," but is actually not all that interested in common men when he meets them.

The supporting cast has some of the best character actors in the business: Steve Buscemi, Tony Shaloub, Judy Davis, and John Mahoney as a thinly disguised William Faulkner. Michael Lerner got an Oscar nomination for his hilarious supporting role as a blustery Hollywood producer who pretends to care about art but really is only concerned with the studio's bottom line.

John Goodman also gets one of his best parts ever as Fink's suspiciously friendly neighbor. There are lots of great little touches, such as the multiple ways in which Fink's hotel is made to seem like Hell itself.

There's the creepy sucking noise his door makes every time it is opened or closed, and the way the wallpaper keeps sweating and peeling. The movie goes along in a relatively conventional manner for a while before totally going off the rails and into crazy Coen territory in the last half-hour.

The fact that this was only their fourth movie is impressive, and makes you wonder how these guys keep getting away with it.