![]() ![]() Set in Hollywood shortly before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, BARTON FINK serves as one of the earliest showcases for actor John Turturro as a leading man, and he pours his heart and soul into his performance as the titular Jewish playwright with coke bottle glasses and the battiest hairdo this side of ERASERHEAD. ![]() By channeling these frustrations and unloading them onto their hapless, eponymous protagonist, the Coens managed to create one of the most inspired and celebrated works of their entire career. BARTON FINK covers this external aspect of the profession quite comprehensively, but it also spends a considerable amount of time exploring the writer’s internal conflict: the debilitating uncertainty about whether the work at hand is something important, or merely trash, when oftentimes the difference between the two is completely indistinguishable. Hollywood has a long history of appropriating celebrated playwrights for the cinematic medium, and an even longer laundry list of brilliant ideas that were trampled over by populistic commercial schemes hatched by those who couldn’t write their way out of a paper bag. Most writers wants to create lasting, important works that inspire their audience, but these ambitions are usually incongruous with the commercial aspects of the profession. Initially intended as something of a diversionary project, the Coens’ fourth feature, BARTON FINK, taps into a primal aspect of the writer’s psyche. They drew from a wide variety of references Preston Sturge’s SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS, Roman Polanski’s REPULSION and THE TENANT, and Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING, in addition to numerous other literary influences and traditions to create a thoroughly postmodern tale about Barton Fink, a New York playwright who moves to Hollywood to write for the movies on the eve of America’s entry into World War 2. As mentioned before, the Coen Brothers hit something of a mental block while writing MILLER’S CROSSING, so they stepped away from it and traveled to New York and for 3 weeks, where they hammered out a new story intended as a vehicle for their MILLER’S CROSSING star John Turturro. ![]()
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