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+

Hail, Caesar!

HAIL, CAESAR! (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, 2016)

As Head of Physical Production at Capitol Pictures Studio, Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) is an overworked executive who wonders if his efforts are worth all of the trouble. In HAIL, CAESAR! he’s not just overseeing the filmmaking on the backlot but primarily attending to the professional and private matters of Capitol’s contracted performers and directors. He’s more likely to be breaking up a starlet’s illicit photo shoot in the wee hours and managing images as he is to be behind a desk poring over spreadsheets.

HAIL, CAESAR! tracks an eventful, although not altogether atypical, day-plus for Mannix. Baird Whitlock, (George Clooney), the star of a Biblical epic, goes missing and is being held for ransom. Bathing beauty DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson) is in need of a husband to legitimize the pregnancy that isn’t yet showing or known by the gossip columnists. Singing cowboy Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) gets plugged into a period drama that isn’t particularly suited to his talent for acrobatic horsemanship, thus testing the patience of the film’s director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes). Amid this turmoil Mannix also has to fend off twin tabloid reporters Thora and Thessaly Thacker (Tilda Swinton) and slip out for a meeting with a Lockheed recruiter who promises him an easy and lucrative job.

Joel and Ethan Coen’s arch and affectionate send-up of early 1950s Hollywood provides plenty of surface pleasures for lovers of film history. Their gorgeous recreation of an aquatic musical scene analogous to one featuring Esther Williams evokes Technicolor movie magic in part through geometric design. A Gene Kelly-like routine with Channing Tatum leading a group of pent-up sailors in a song and dance number in a bar stands out as the sort of funny and joyous human spectacle that cinema excels at capturing. The latest and greatest computer-generated effects can be thrilling, but so too can men hoofing atop tables as tablecloths are pulled out from under them.

Although the Coens demonstrate fondness for classic Hollywood, they remind regularly of the artifice it is founded on. Stories about stars are planted with the press to match how the company wishes its employees to be perceived by the public. The studio bosses arrange dates between its actors and actresses solely for publicity and cover up legal matters as boosters and protection of the bottom line. The tops of sets and crews can be visible, sometimes from a distance, during these tremendous scenes of filmed entertainment. Dailies and rough cuts reveal the manipulation that goes into building an illusion of the projected dream world. As one of the Thackers says, people want to believe in something, not the facts, and the movies sell a kind of perfection. The Coens strive to undercut it while acknowledging the strange beauty all this fakery can produce. In a dark night of the soul moment for Mannix, he visits the Jesus film’s set of Golgotha. There’s nothing realistic about the crucifixes against the muted backdrop, yet the setting emphasizes a real yearning for spiritual enlightenment.

With its opening shot of Christ on the cross and first scene of Mannix in a confessional, there’s no mistaking that HAIL, CAESAR! is about the search for existential purpose and how it gets mixed up with art, commerce, and religion. Mannix’s turmoil comes from thinking that what he’s made his life’s work is frivolous and difficult. He isn’t wrong, yet Mannix isn’t quite ready to trade it in for something that won’t demand much from him while yielding greater rewards. How Mannix spends his days may be inconsequential in the grand scheme, yet isn’t he fulfilling a higher calling if going about his job with enthusiasm in spite of the struggles? Plus, there is a time and place for the minor. A lasso fashioned out of a string of spaghetti is effectively useless, yet there’s something to be said for the fleeting delight in seeing one in action.

Grade: B+

Inside Llewyn Davis

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2013)

When Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham) tells Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) that he doesn’t connect with people, the manager of influential Chicago folk music club Gate of Horn is evaluating him as a performer.  The assessment could just as well apply to the singer’s interpersonal relationships, though. Llewyn tends to approach the world as if it owes him for gracing everyone with his presence and talent.  He’s perpetually in need of a couch to crash on, and he doesn’t think twice about asking his friend Jim (Justin Timberlake) to lend him money to terminate another pregnancy he may be responsible for.  Never mind that the unnamed woman wanting an abortion is Jim’s girlfriend Jean (Carey Mulligan).

Despite his sour disposition and frequent impositions,  Llewyn continues to be treated generously, which suggests people believe he deserves their help even if he takes it for granted and risks alienating his friends and acquaintances in the Greenwich Village folk scene.  Perhaps it means that while he behaves like a jerk now, he didn’t always, or not to this degree.  His current career struggles and the way his musical partnership was severed explain why he’s mired in a funk and why people may be willing to cut him some slack.  Set during a blustery February 1961, INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS externalizes Llewyn’s depression.  Cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel swabs the singer’s environment in gray and often suggests occupying a dark space for enduring Job-like trials.  

Co-writers and directors Joel and Ethan Coen merge O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? and A SERIOUS MAN into INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS’ bleak but comic musical journey with an impeccable soundtrack.  Structured like a song in the round, Llewyn’s odyssey takes a circular shape with which he’s out of sync.  He doesn’t come in at the proper place and stumbles to find the appropriate exit point to break the cycle and rejoin where he should.  Although he can anticipate what’s coming, Llewyn is doomed to remain in the loop at the wrong measure.

Isaac isn’t pressed to mold Llewyn into someone appealing to have around, yet his apparent neediness attracts empathy despite his surly and defeated bearing.  Misery loves company, and he’s the kind of person who can be comforting to have around when everyone is having a rough time of it.  If and when others in Llewyn’s circle break through, something that is likely closer than the characters suspect, he’s also one they’ll leave behind because his unfulfilled high self-regard and standards will make him intolerable to be near.  Llewyn isn’t chasing professional success as much as he’s trying to escape himself, and he’d rather decry what he perceives as selling out than to compromise the integrity of his art.

The cool emotional tone of INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS benefits from the humor the supporting cast generates.  Adam Driver’s gut-busting backing vocals to novelty song “Please Mr. Kennedy” represent everything Llewyn resists.  John Goodman’s scornful jazz man, who derides the inferiority of a suicidal man’s leaping spot, indicates what Llewyn’s future could be if he doesn’t change course.  Mulligan’s brittleness and seething anger toward Llewyn produce a funny inversion of the sweet harmonizer she is on stage with her boyfriend.  Timberlake doesn’t play his moments for laughs but does well displaying the decency and heart that Llewyn resists in himself.

Although the protagonist appears unable to tap any reserves of affection, the Coens present his story as a common, tragic tale with a lot of compassion.  For filmmakers often accused (and wrongly so) of being snide, this prickly comedy-drama demonstrates that there’s more below than surface to discover if one’s willing to take a closer look.

Grade: A