Barton Fink (1991)

Sitting here, I can’t help but feel like the titular playwright behind the Coen brothers’ 1991 drama/comedy/horror/film noir masterpiece Barton Fink. I don’t know where to begin this post, and I certainly don’t know where, or how, to end. The film confounds. You see, Barton Fink is a film about process: torturous, consuming, emasculating, arduous process. John Turturro stars as Fink, a celebrated playwright in New York who travels west in the hopes of securing enough capital by writing a “wrestling picture” for Hollywood to continue his dramatic bent towards the “struggles of the common man.” Fink arrives in L.A. and checks in to the decrepit Hotel Earle, wherein he discovers his (philosophically) platonic literary subject in the form of an insurance salesman, Charlie Meadows (John Goodman). This is only the beginning of Fink’s prolonged odyssey through Hollywood. As the playwright turned screenwriter struggles with his own creative vision, he must pass through the crucible of L.A.’s most erratic gatekeepers in the form of producers (the Oscar nominated performance of Jack Lerner) and writers, one of which bears an uncanny resemblance to William Faulkner. The process of “plunging the depths” drives Fink toward absurd and apocalyptic consequences in an unforgettably horrifying ending.

Barton Fink is the Coen brothers’ most allusive and literary film to date. The composition of Hotel Earle eerily resembles that of the Overlook (The Shining), and the continued references to fascism, religion, and the writing process as a whole render the film tantalizingly cryptic. Fink challenges notions of maintaining an objective reality in the face of a singularly subjective pursuit, characterizing the unsettling truth that the existence of a middle ground is not only absent, but disturbingly so. The Coen brothers’ have a knack for journeys, and the interiority and intimacy of Fink proves their own genius at such an early stage of their own.