Barton Fink

BARTON FINK (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 1991)

New York playwright Barton Fink (John Turturro) is fresh off a stage success in 1941 when Hollywood comes calling. Barton fancies himself as working toward a new theater for the common man, but he is reluctantly drawn to accept an opportunity that can help to finance much more of what he really wants to do. In BARTON FINK studio executive Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner) couldn’t be more enthusiastic about hiring this writer in to bring his special touch to the pictures, but Barton soon learns he’s not going to be working on anything highbrow. Jack assigns him to pen a wrestling B-movie starring Wallace Beery and wants a screenplay by week’s end.

For his time in Los Angeles Barton strives to abide by his principles, choosing to take residence in the ramshackle Hotel Earle than the swankier places where the studio could put him up. Driven to distraction by the noise from the neighboring room, Barton complains to the front desk, resulting in Charlie Meadows (John Goodman), the traveling insurance salesman next door, to come by to apologize. Charlie is a friendly guy, and he makes it a habit to drop by Barton’s room when he fears him enter. Although Barton wants to work, he has a hard time rejecting Charlie’s company. Anyway, he’s in state of paralysis in which he can’t get past describing the film’s first scene.

BARTON FINK unspools like the spiritual predecessor to last year’s Coen brothers’ film HAIL, CAESAR! Although they take place ten years apart, both are set at the fictional Capital Studios and initiate existential crises in their main characters. Barton’s most obvious conflict is an ill-timed case of writer’s block, but what brings it on is harder to pin down. Is he simply out of his element in a different medium? Can he not write because he thinks the work is beneath me, or is he not as in touch with the common man he reveres? The film is too slippery to identify as being about one particular thing. Stylistically it’s a supremely weird combination of satire, horror, film noir, and religious allegory. Still, at its core is the despair of not being able to escape the one’s own mind.

The aphorism of indeterminate origin “no matter where you go, there you are” succinctly describes Barton’s predicament. BARTON FINK puts forward that the writer might occupy a literal fiery furnace, one that makes the wallpaper glue drip and the decorative surfaces peel. It seems significant that the film begins and ends with shots of the wallpaper, the sort of thing one can’t look away from or would stare at while trying to pump ideas out of a dry mental well. Yet it’s just as plausible that the heat Barton feels is stoked by his own feelings of impostor-like inadequacy.

For all of the esteem Barton expresses for the common man, he doesn’t listen to the one in his midst. Charlie, a fellow as affable as they get, struggles to get a word in edgewise, and when he does, Barton doesn’t listen. A solution to his problem is right in front of him, but Barton is so preoccupied with what’s rattling around his skull that he can’t spot it. That grand cosmic joke stretches across Joel and Ethan Coen’s films. The suffering person’s inability to save themselves is a grand cosmic joke that stretches across Joel and Ethan Coen’s films. It’s darker in BARTON FINK, in part because the writer embraces that pain as if it is inherently holy.

Grade: B+

Defending Your Life

DEFENDING YOUR LIFE (Albert Brooks, 1991)

Having been struck head-on by a bus after going left of center in his new car, Daniel Miller (Albert Brooks) comes to in a place that looks a lot like the western United States but is not on Earth. In DEFENDING YOUR LIFE the Los Angeles advertising man learns that he is dead and has been brought to Judgment City for a four-day review of his life. As all of his life has been recorded, the trial-like setting will feature the prosecution and defense presenting footage of his actions in an attempt to prove to two judges what motivated his actions. If he is determined to have lived with courage, he will proceed to whatever comes next in the universe’s design. If Daniel is found to have lived in fear, he will be returned to Earth to try again.

Daniel is a neurotic sort, so naturally this process, which his defender Bob Diamond (Rip Torn) insists is not a trial, makes him anxious. He can’t fully enjoy what Judgment City has to offer, from the chance to discover one’s past lives to the ability to eat all you want without gaining weight, because he wonders how his life will be assessed. Daniel is somewhat able to take his mind off of this whole ordeal when he meets Julia (Meryl Streep), a woman of the same approximate earthly age. He finds himself quickly falling in love with her, yet he resists to a degree because of his expectation that she will be moving forward while he will be sent back to Earth.

Perhaps the cleverest and funniest conceit of DEFENDING YOUR LIFE is that Daniel has no firmer grasp on how things are supposed to work in Judgment City than any of us do in our mortal lives. He can look for meaning in his surroundings, but without understanding how the place works, it’s all conjecture. Daniel is just as insecure in this way station, worrying about how the number of days being reviewed in his case and the modesty of his accommodations might be indicative of the verdict that awaits him. For this short period he is in a spot where fear should not be a factor, yet it continues to drive his choices and outlook. To make matters worse, everyone assures him that he doesn’t need to fret about anything. As writer, director, and star, Brooks taps into the nagging feeling that everyone knows something that you don’t, especially when they appear unconcerned.

Brooks has fun with the idea of a bureaucratic layover on the spiritual plane. Waiting room coffee table books are all photographs from God’s eye view, even of Judgment City. While the deceased are taken to places that resemble where they are from, there’s something amusing in the thought that mundane urban and suburban architecture would be soothing for souls in transition. Brooks also humorously envisions that even in death one can be made to feel small. Daniel has to sit through a blooper reel of his pratfalls and mistakes. Bob pokes fun at humans like for the low percentage of their brains they utilize compared to Judgment City’s residents like him. Insecurity, it seems, is something to be overcome to progress in the eternal.

While Brooks’ character has a nervous energy about him, DEFENDING YOUR LIFE provides a warm, funny space to consider larger questions of existence. Brooks challenges the notion that courageous and fearful behavior are clear cut from one another. Rather, what can appear cowardly may be a sign of internal strength and what seems brave may just be a survival instinct. Streep bestows a peaceful air upon Julia, who lived less fearfully than Daniel, yet even she is not wholly free of hang-ups. Typically an exploration of self doubt would wrap with a skeptical or ironic tone, but Brooks finds a way to conclude DEFENDING YOUR LIFE that feels hopeful and honest without betraying the protagonist’s cautious nature.

Grade: A-

Career Opportunities

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES (Bryan Gordon, 1991)

When I was in high school I entertained the notion that spending a full 24 hours with friends in Meijer, a Midwestern supermarket supercenter chain, would be a fun thing to do.  Everything one could want or need would be under that enormous roof.  I could eat three square meals, watch the row of display TVs, play the floor model video game console, read a book or magazine, and probably grab a nap in the camping section if a little shuteye was necessary.

Since Meijer is open 24 hours a day, attempting this feat was feasible, assuming management didn’t get suspicious of teenagers hanging out for such a long time.  I suppose a day of roaming the aisles of mega-commerce could be pulled off today if this feat still sounded appealing in any way.  Maybe the attraction would return if Jennifer Connelly wanted to accompany me on the adventure.  After all, according to CAREER OPPORTUNITIES a woman like her is attainable at your monolithic neighborhood discount retailer.  

In the 1991 comedy 21-year-old Jim Dodge (Frank Whaley) is living up to his surname as far as adulthood is concerned.  He has been fired from countless jobs, spins wild fictions of his activities, resides with his parents, and doesn’t show any concern that such an undistinguished existence is his present and foreseeable future in sleepy, working class Monroe, Illinois.

Jim’s dad (John M. Jackson) gives him one more chance to get his act together.  Otherwise it’s off to St. Louis to work for his uncle.  Jim is dropped at the front doors of Target and expected to come home with employment.  Things are looking up when he negotiates a plum hiring package from a middle manager (an uncredited John Candy), but it turns out Jim was mistaken for an operations manager candidate.  The offer is immediately withdrawn.  Instead Jim is presented with a virtually minimum wage job as the night janitor or nothing.

On his first night the head custodian (William Forsythe) locks Jim in the superstore and explains that he’ll be back at 7 a.m.  Jim puts his nose to the grindstone for a bit, but it isn’t long before he’s availing himself of the store’s wares and roller skating up and down the aisles in his underwear.  Then he glimpses a girl.  And not just any girl but The Girl.  Josie McClellan (Connelly), the beautiful daughter of the town’s wealthiest man, is there looking back at him.

Josie fell asleep in the dressing room while hiding there and weighing whether or not to shoplift.  As she explains to Jim, she resents her father and feels like her life peaked with high school.  A little petty theft might rattle her dad and grant her the personal freedom she doesn’t feel is available without drastic action, although she inevitably lacks the courage to follow through on her ill-considered plan.

During their overnight talks Josie senses that Jim is a kindred spirit in spite of their obvious differences.  Neither is happy with their current lots, but she has enough cash in her purse that they can pick a place on the map, run off together, and start anew.  Before they can follow through on their impetuous decision, a pair of bumbling crooks (Dermot Mulroney and Kieran Mulroney) break into the store and hold them hostage, sort of.

Although Bryan Gordon directs CAREER OPPORTUNITIES, the film so distinctly bears producer and screenwriter John Hughes’ fingerprints that one can be forgiven for thinking he’s behind the camera.  Jim is a deluded washout, yet he’s a character very much in the tradition of Ferris Bueller.  (Never mind that Whaley’s performance is in the register of Woody Allen as a ‘50s-styled Midwestern gentile.)  His verbal dexterity and flair for bold acts are meant to recall that high school hero, except the best Jim can do is impress grade school kids who readily swallow the baloney he feeds them.  Jim’s hometown knows him as a liar--Josie says so--yet the film can’t help but inexplicably view him as a charming dreamer.  Ferris Bueller pushed the limits but had the good sense not to be as self-sabotaging as Jim.

Jim and Josie don’t set all manner of painful traps to fend off the thieves, but HOME ALONE is also imprinted on CAREER OPPORTUNITIES.  Like an unattended child doing what mom and dad won’t allow, Jim indulges his whims with Target to himself...and so can you during regular shopping hours in their 1763 stores in 49 states.  (I have no idea what Target’s financial involvement was with the film, but surely it was a cozy corporate relationship.  Target’s bullseye logo is used in the on-screen opening title.)  The stupid robbers who interrupt Jim’s blissful evening with Josie might as well have driven across the state from failed burglaries in HOME ALONE’s Chicago suburb to Monroe.

The class-conscious romance is pure Hughes, although in this instance it hardly seems credible in spite of some nice moments Josie and Jim share as they open up to each other and discuss their disappointments.  Hughes displays a deft touch in Jim’s initial failure to listen to Josie as she reveals deep fears of what awaits her.  He’s so caught up in his own neuroses that he can’t take the time to pay attention to her in a way that it seems no one ever has.  Hughes’ skill in tapping adolescent longing is also evident in Jim’s remembrance of the brief contact he had with Josie in high school.  While he vividly recalls the time they danced not even for the duration of one song and wishes it could have been slightly more, she retains no knowledge of it.  

Such interactions and the confessions therein might have amounted to something substantial if CAREER OPPORTUNITIES were stripped to their heartfelt conversations.  That’s where the film’s modest strengths are found.  Instead the romance is broken up by the aforementioned criminals, Josie’s father (Noble Willingham) and a police officer (Barry Corbin) searching the town for her, and, most unnecessarily, cutaways of Jim’s dad engaged in a late night bout of stress eating.  With these regular diversions the bond between Jim and Josie becomes too easily forged, especially considering the distance with which Connelly plays her poor little rich girl character and the happy ending envisioned for these two.  

For better and worse, CAREER OPPORTUNITIES plays like a hodgepodge of Hughes’ greatest hits. The themes resonate while the particulars don't translate as well to young adults.  The confidence that Jim and Josie can break out of their ruts and thrive together would be more convincing if they were headed to college and not a working world they are unequipped for.  The problem isn’t that CAREER OPPORTUNITIES devotes its heart to romantic fantasy but that it throws reason and reality to the wind for an off-putting guy and shortsighted girl.  After all, in the early morning hours sweeping floors at Target, you’re more likely to come face to face with a mess in aisle three needing cleaned up than the girl of your dreams with $52,000 in cash and looking to run away to California with you.

Grade: C-