Barton Fink
Started & Finished: 11/26/09
You know what? I didn’t get it. Okay? I said it. Great acting, great dialogue, beautiful sets, love the Coen Brothers, but… they lost me with this one. I wrote the following as an attempt to cover up that I really had no idea what to make of the movie, and don’t have the urge to consider it further. If you care to read my cowardly review in which I hide behind big words, you can do so with a line through it all. Ugh. This is so unintentionally (yet fittingly) meta it makes me sick.
You know you’re doing something right as a filmmaker when you can break the rules and still have the audience in the palm of your hand. While a movie with minimal character interactions and such lengthy scenes might be doomed with any other writer and director, the Coens and co. pull off an incredible feat in Barton Fink: they make the excruciating dullness of writer’s block fascinating.
But quite some time after the mood is established, the plot takes a hard right turn and veers into more ambiguous territory, where heavy symbolism crashes the party. Because I was so invested in the writerly aspects of the film, the (now expected) Coen Brothers thriller twist felt abrupt. Once murder came into play, the story flew off the rails and into a murky grey area in which the audience is expecting a noir mystery and instead, gets a questionable allegory.
I realize that my frustration with this ambiguity is contrary to my own philosophies— namely that the best films have a fair amount of uncertainty so as to involve the audience. But my issue with Barton Fink stems from neither the straightforward story nor the metaphor were able to stand alone by the end- nothing made sense in either established worlds.
I really do want to love this movie, and I’m much happier having finally seen it from beginning to end. But I’m just not invested enough in parts of the plot to make me want to ponder the true meaning of the film for much longer than it takes me to write this. That John Turturro though, wow. And I thought I had trouble typing these 3-paragraph write-ups.
