![]() ![]() Their decency is part and parcel with their role in society, whereas no such prerequisite exists for Barton Fink the playwright. Marge and Ed Tom probably share this, too, but that sort of gets lost in their characterization because they’re officers of the law. But Barton stands out in another way: he’s a decent guy. Only Fargo‘s Marge and No Country for Old Men‘s Ed Tom really fit with Reagan in their quiet intelligence. Reagan stood out because he had a brain in his head, which makes him opposed to the classic Coen “hero”: the hapless, lovable idiot. We actually said the exact same thing in our review of Miller’s Crossing, the prior Coen flick, in reference to hat-chasing protagonist Tom Reagan. That said, a retrospective rundown does underscore how different Barton is from the usual Coen protagonist. If there’s anything to read into with certainty in Barton Fink, it’s likely the ways in which the most oblique elements subtly inform the main character. Importantly, Fink‘s power - not unlike that of the Coens’ later effort A Serious Man, which shares a great many qualities with this film - does not rely on you “getting” it. ![]() As with the rest of our Coen Brothers Director Series, revisiting Fink in the context of the Coen oeuvre is more of a hunt for commonality (or deviation) across the retrospective, rather than a prescriptive lens by which to “get” the given film. If you’re interested in movies about movies, Film Plays Itself represents a kaleidoscopic cross-section of Hollywood artistry that encapsulates pretty much everything you could want.įor a pair of writer/directors with a consistent knack for inscrutable cinema - and general inscrutability as just, y’know, people - Barton Fink might be the most head-scratchingly opaque effort from Joel and Ethan Coen. Here, film artists are by turns inspiring, insipid, visionary, avaricious, down on themselves, full of themselves. Here, Tinseltown is by turns cynical, magical, savage, surreal, everything you could possibly hope for, anything you could possibly imagine. Not long ago we lauded the Film Plays Itself series on the Criterion Channel, a collection of films about films that includes everything from Sunset Boulevard to 8½ to Hollywood Shuffle to Adaptation. ![]()
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