A Three-Espresso Hallucination

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

You're going to be hearing a lot about Barton Fink in the next few weeks. Gnomic, claustrophobic, hallucinatory, just plain weird, it is the kind of movie critics can soak up thousands of words analyzing and cinephiles can soak up at least three espressos arguing their way through.

It is, as well, the first film to accomplish the hat trick at the Cannes festival (best picture, best director and best actor), and we all understand, don't we, that when it comes to our own movies, the French always know what's best for -- and by -- us American primitives.

Finally, it is the work of two brothers, Joel and Ethan Coen, who have, professionally speaking, rolled themselves into a single, significant auteur in the course of just seven years and four films, in the process developing cult and critical followings of large and vociferous proportions.

In other words, intrinsically problematic as Barton Fink is, it is good copy, especially in August, when scarcely an interesting creature is stirring in the theaters. Whether or not it is likely to prove good box office is quite another, if equally problematic, matter. For this is Terminhood season, and one has to wonder: Do a profitably large number of American citizens, out for a good time, or at best a conventionally inspirational one, really want to see a movie that is essentially about a man sitting in a hotel room suffering a monumental writer's block in Hollywood a half-century ago?

The answer is almost certainly no. This is not, putting it mildly, a subject of wide or particularly pressing current interest. Barton Fink's capacity for spiritual uplift is nil, and though the plight of the eponymous scrivener is often bleakly funny, we are not talking Hot Shots! here. In fact, with its long passages in which, literally, we are invited to watch nothing more stirring than paper peeling off the walls (or not moving through Barton's typewriter), the movie may challenge the faith of even the most loyal Coenheads.

But it will never shatter that faith beyond repair. For even when its narrative stalls and its dialogue stammers incoherently, the picture seems at worst a necessary mistake for its creators. At its best, and especially considered in the light of the Coens' previous ventures, Barton Fink seems both marvelously audacious and quite inevitable.

The Coens' earlier films, like those of many young filmmakers, worked out of, and off of, the American genre tradition. Blood Simple was a film noir, Raising Arizona a screwball comedy of sorts and Miller's Crossing, which was probably 1990's best movie, a reanimation of the classic gangster dramas of the 1930s. But these movies were not send-ups, rip-offs or slavish homages. Each was, instead, a dark, devious and witty reinvention of whatever inspired it. Barton Fink is, in this context, a logical next step. Evoking no particular genre, it is nothing less than a shrewdly perverse gloss on the darkly romantic (and wildly oversimplified) dialectic by which people have for ages tried -- and failed -- to understand how the whole movie enterprise works.

As this story is traditionally told, Hollywood is the great corrupter of innocent talent, luring it away from righteousness with false promises of easy money for easy work, then blunting and eventually ruining it with vulgar values and stupefying assignments. In the Coens' revision of this legend, their title character (John Turturro, quite correctly a Coen favorite) is a proletarian playwright who calls to mind that real-life theatrical leftist $ Clifford Odets. Working on a wrestling picture at the behest of a studio boss (Michael Lerner) straight out of every literary intellectual's nightmares, and turning for advice to drunken, softly cynical W.P. Mayhew (John Mahoney), a figure unmistakably inspired by William Faulkner, Barton is neither a heroic symbol of resistance to materialism nor a sympathetic victim. He's just kind of a jerk.

Historically Odets is usually seen as the great cautionary example of what Hollywood can do to a principled artist. But as the Coens reimagine the type, it is actually his unexamined political principles that undo him, not Hollywood crassness. Believing not wisely but entirely too well that all virtue resides in the common man, he befriends Charlie Meadows (John Goodman), his next-door neighbor in the hotel, who could not be more genially common -- nor better played. Goodman's sunny menace sheds a glorious crosslight on Turturro's superb performance as an almost perfectly unattractive man, at once arrogant and self-effacing, politically articulate yet incapable of ordinary human connections.

Anyone else but Barton might have read the danger signals Meadows sends forth, might have guessed at the murderous madness beneath his bonhomie. When, eventually, Meadows strikes perilously close to Barton, and the writer finally asks why, he gets a chilling answer that contains, perhaps, the entire moral of the movie. "Because you don't listen," Meadows says. This is, of course, precisely the problem with people who substitute grand ideological fantasies for clear and realistic observation of the world.

The Coens, who themselves like to play boyish innocence, are in fact odd ducks, not least in their symbiotic closeness. In conversation they have a slightly spooky habit of finishing each other's sentences. "You're only working with one boss," says Barry Sonnenfeld, the cinematographer of their first three films. "He just happens to be in two bodies." In their compulsively careful (and frugal) working methods, the Coens are as alienated from contemporary Hollywood as their protagonist is from the old-time movie colony. Growing up in a Minneapolis suburb, the sons of university teachers, they made little super-8 parodies of the movies they saw on TV before going their separate ways for a while -- Joel, now 35, to study film at New York University and start a career as editor of low-budget features, Ethan, now 32, to major in philosophy at Princeton. It may be that the former's intelligence is the more cinematic, the latter's the more literary, but only they know for certain the details of their collaboration.

And they're not telling. On all their films Joel is credited as the director, Ethan as the producer and both as screenwriters; but it is hard to tell where one leaves off and the other begins. Nor will they discuss the quite separate private lives they lead when they leave the Manhattan studio apartment where they meet every day to write and storyboard their films. They also refuse to lay out the meanings of their films or make any large moral claims for them. They say the Barton Fink script arose in part out of a writing block of their own, in part out of a desire to write a good role for their pal Turturro, in part because, in Ethan's words, "we started thinking about a big empty hotel." As he says of these various elements, "Who knows quite how they go together or what precipitates what?" To say more than that, adds Joel, "is just not appealing to us in any way."

Indeed, their dreamlike realization of their script, though often imagistically striking, deliberately subverts their message and all too often alienates the viewer. You get the feeling that visually they are purposely, maybe even maliciously, messing with our heads instead of informing us. But whether they admit it or not -- and it's not something anyone who needs mainstream financing is likely to own up to -- the Coens are palpably, self- consciously postmodern artists, and that sets them apart from almost everybody else making theatrical films in America today. They are therefore entitled to patience, respect and, yes, perhaps a special gratitude for this movie, which never once compromises its fundamentally unpromising yet courageously aspiring nature.

With reporting by Janice C. Simpson/New York