Word: bartons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...other words, intrinsically problematic as Barton Fink is, it is good copy, especially in August, when scarcely an interesting creature is stirring in the theaters. Whether or not it is likely to prove good box office is quite another, if equally problematic, matter. For this is Terminhood season, and one has to wonder: Do a profitably large number of American citizens, out for a good time, or at best a conventionally inspirational one, really want to see a movie that is essentially about a man sitting in a hotel room suffering a monumental writer's block in Hollywood a half...
...answer is almost certainly no. This is not, putting it mildly, a subject of wide or particularly pressing current interest. Barton Fink's capacity for spiritual uplift is nil, and though the plight of the eponymous scrivener is often bleakly funny, we are not talking Hot Shots! here. In fact, with its long passages in which, literally, we are invited to watch nothing more stirring than paper peeling off the walls (or not moving through Barton's typewriter), the movie may challenge the faith of even the most loyal Coenheads...
...will never shatter that faith beyond repair. For even when its narrative stalls and its dialogue stammers incoherently, the picture seems at worst a necessary mistake for its creators. At its best, and especially considered in the light of the Coens' previous ventures, Barton Fink seems both marvelously audacious and quite inevitable...
...comedy of sorts and Miller's Crossing, which was probably 1990's best movie, a reanimation of the classic gangster dramas of the 1930s. But these movies were not send-ups, rip-offs or slavish homages. Each was, instead, a dark, devious and witty reinvention of whatever inspired it. Barton Fink is, in this context, a logical next step. Evoking no particular genre, it is nothing less than a shrewdly perverse gloss on the darkly romantic (and wildly oversimplified) dialectic by which people have for ages tried -- and failed -- to understand how the whole movie enterprise works...
...they discuss the quite separate private lives they lead when they leave the Manhattan studio apartment where they meet every day to write and storyboard their films. They also refuse to lay out the meanings of their films or make any large moral claims for them. They say the Barton Fink script arose in part out of a writing block of their own, in part out of a desire to write a good role for their pal Turturro, in part because, in Ethan's words, "we started thinking about a big empty hotel." As he says of these various elements...