With 90 minutes of soul violence that is A Serious Man just released on DVD, perhaps it’s a good time to revisit the Coen brother’s other Squirm enduing existential fable Barton Fink (For a trilogy of Coen flavored despair watch with The Man Who Wasn’t There but take care to remove the razor blades and sleeping pills from your house first).
While Fink isn’t quite as excruciating as A Serious Man, if only because its title character is a lot more deserving of some karmic realignmen.
It’s still a sweaty turn of the screw. A film about claustrophobia of the mind. Barton is a New York writer who after a successful, but terrible and pretentious play, is summoned to Hollywood. What initially looks like a big break soon turns into a waking nightmare, as Barton develops a monstrous case of writers block and is assigned to write a “Wallace Beery Wrestling Picture.” A line I’ve been quoting to stupefied looks for about ten years.
What’s more he finds out that his hero is a drunk whose been publishing his secretary’s work under his name for the past ten years, his friendly neighbor, played by John Goodman in a performance equally funny, scary, and somehow monstrously pitable, has some serious issues, he’s wanted for a murder he’s reasonably sure he didn’t commit, there’s a head shaped box that has appeared in his hotel room, and his hotel might be a literal door into hell. Why its enough to make a fella say, “Heil Hitler”.
The Coen’s make this all work by giving the film such a twitchy sense of paranoia. The film generates a sense of unease that’s almost Lynchian, but as unlike Lynch’s dream logic everything here makes a horrific kind of sense. Its some of the Coen’s most stylisitically rich work (which really is saying a hell of a lot. There’s a fever dream intensity to the film, the falling wall paper that clings to the wall with viscous vile looking glue. The screening of the dailies, from another wrestling film" Devil On The Canvas", for Fink the screen reflected off his glasses. The wrestler getting up a seemingly infinite amount of times roaring “I will destroy him” as he lunges towards the camera is one of the Coen’s most nightmarish scenes. I don’t know why but I’ve always found something about it to be utterly hypnotic.
The film is aided pitch perfect performances by Steve Buscemi, John Mahoney, Tony Shaloub, Judy Davis, and Michael Lerner who all find just the right pitch of unsettling to play their characters at. And of course there is Turturro’s committed, to say the least, performance.
Fink is as open to interpretation as The Big Lebowskwi, is Fink a parable for the rise of the Nazi’s, a kind of Dante’s Inferno with Fink meeting the human avatar’s of vice? Or is it simply a rancid little Hollywood satire, blasting at both the institution and those who think themselves above it? Whatever its meaning, Fink remains an unsettling masterpiece.
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