Barton Fink

Barton Fink is perhaps the Coen brothers' oddest film, and that's saying something. It's not the silliest, but there's a strange, symbolic thing going on through the whole movie, and by the end it takes over the actual story. It's about a playwright from New York played by John Turturro who is brought to Hollywood to write for motion pictures, and who struggles when brought out of his comfort zone and forced to write in a genre he doesn't understand. The movie is very slow to get started, and doesn't really get entertaining until about half an hour in. The fun comes from the people Turturro meets in the new city, who provide the sort of dialogue we've grown used to from the Coens - crisp, clever, and unique. The acting is quite strong all around, as everyone besides Turturro gets two or three good scenes to show off their chops, and they're all up the task.

Before the Coen brothers were winning Oscars, this movie took home a hat trick at Cannes, including the Palme d'Or. It's definitely the sort of thing voters at film festivals would go for, the most of any of their work. There's an unusual structure to the film, and as it goes on the viewer's comprehension can only drop as strange things being happening without a ton of resolution, culminating in the climax which brings a metaphor completely to the forefront and a final scene which recalls a repeated image throughout the story, without actually saying anything obviously meaningful. There's a strange mystery to the whole thing, and I'm not sure how much of what happened was supposed to be real. The movie's definitely enjoyable whenever people are speaking, from Buscemi's chipper bellhop, to Goodman's ambiguous salesman, to the fast talking detectives investigating something, and everyone else. Still, I might not recommend the movie to anyone who doesn't already like their work or appreciate more unusual films, because it would be easy to be left unsatisfied by how it all ends. Definitely an odd film.