MYST #3: Barton Fink

There's a scene in Barton Fink where the titular character walks in to the eerie Hotel Earle. A ray of light, shining somewhere from above, casts a thin glow on the dust swirling in the air. The grandiose main hall rests devoid of life and blanketed in silence; it seems as if it's been that way for a long time. When Barton rings a bell to summon a hotel employee, it seems that no one will come, until the bellhop emerges from a trapdoor hidden behind the desk. Suddenly, there are two human beings in this hall. It feels strange, and it begs questions. Why is this hall so empty? What makes it so deeply unsettling? Both questions seem to imply that there is a lot more to Barton Fink than it seems to offer at face value. And indeed, Barton's and the audience's confusion is only rewarded with layer upon layer of bizarre occurrences that make Barton Fink a fearsome and darkly comical journey into the anguish and frustration of a struggling writer's mind.
Directed by the Coen Brothers, Barton Fink follows the aforementioned Barton (John Turturro; neither his first nor his last Coen film), a neurotic and idealistic playwright who has recently been compelled into writing for the movies. After arriving in Hollywood and settling down in the Hotel Earle, Fink meets with Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner), who confesses his unremitted adoration for the man and his talents. He assigns Fink the task of writing a boxing film, and despite Lipnick's apparent confidence in his talents, Fink himself seems to be succumbing to writer's block. He spends the next few days sitting in front of his typewriter, and stares at the same paragraph for what seems like hours. A mosquito buzzing around the room begins to bother him. Fink's neighbor, Charlie Meadows (John Goodman; not his only Coen film either), also proves bothersome, as he's making quite a bit of noise through the hotel's thin walls. However, through circumstance, Fink soon becomes acquainted with Charlie, who is Fink's symbol of the "struggling everyman", selling insurance and, as Charlie puts it, a "peace of mind", Finding that he's found one friend in unforgiving Hollywood, Fink shares his passion with Charlie, explaining that he doesn't write to separate himself from the "common man", but to support him (which ends up sounding thoroughly pretentious). However, despite his passion shining through more than ever, Fink finds he still cannot write. He consults one of his favorite writers (John Mahoney)- who turns out to be a hopeless drunk- and his wife, for advice, and yet he still can't bring himself to write. Only after Fink becomes inexplicably involved in a murder does he seem capable of writing anything, regardless of his rapidly deteriorating mental state.
Barton Fink is a film that flourishes off of subtle uneasiness and anxiety; it's tone consistently matches the increasingly disturbed mind of it's main character and the freakish occurrences around him. As Barton says himself, "I've always found that writing comes from a great inner pain." And it certainly seems that way. He pains at the writing in front of him while the mosquito flies around the room, dominating his thoughts, and the room's wallpaper slowly peels off from the astounding heat. His room becomes his prison, with the movie script as his charge, and as Fink slowly slips further inside himself, so too does the movie slip from a tale of Barton's writer's block to a tale of Barton's psychotic horror thriller excursion (really, I can't describe it any other way) into hell on Earth, a.k.a, his mind and his vision of Hollywood. So, I guess I'd say that Barton Fink is a film that focuses on subtleties... until it doesn't, and decides to dive further into the "life of the mind", as one character states it, than was initially assumed. However, I don't necessarily view this as a fault. This film is, and always has been, about Barton's mind, which has the infallible ability to create. It is Barton's gift, so to speak. It is exactly the influence that outside forces have on this gift that Barton Fink decides to provide commentary on, and if it's necessary to push the film into an even more bizarre realm than where it began to present such commentary, then so be it.
From the unsettling hallway of the Hotel Earle (which is shot in what seems to be a direct reference to Kubrick and The Shining, a film that's also about a writer losing his mind), with archways that seem to stretch on into infinity, to the colorful and atypical characters that surround Barton, and, of course, the incessantly peeling wallpaper, it becomes steadily apparent that the Coens have put a great amount of effort into sucking the audience into a world that is, at first, just left of normal. It features all the common elements of their greats: the slow, silent shots of nothingness featured in No Country for Old Men, the dark and parodical humor of Fargo, and even the stunning and disturbing bouts of violence in Blood Simple. Through the combination of these cinematic elements, Barton Fink becomes a film to give oneself to; to become enraptured within the oddball world the Coens have created. It's probably their most surreal creation, and I believe that it thoroughly paid off.

Acting is altogether exceptional. Turturro does a fantastic job as a snobbish and idealistic writer slowly being destroyed by Hollywood. Goodman, on the other hand, is more akin to something sublime. Portraying an innocent simplemindedness obscuring a terrifyingly psychotic personality, Goodman seems to make the scenes he's displayed in. Much like his character of Walter Sobchak in another Coen film, The Big Lebowski, Goodman's Charlie Meadows is loud-mouthed, proud, and in more ways than one, completely mental. Other great performances include Michael Lerner as Lipnick, who earned an Oscar nod for his performance (robbing Goodman of his, in my opinion), and, interestingly enough, Tony Shalhoub (known for Monk) as a scummy and disrespectful producer. Performances from Judy Davis and a very small role for Jon Polito are also added to the mix, and both do well with the script the Coens have given them. In fact, it seems, everyone does well with the script, which gives such zany life to all of the characters that all actors involved seem to be fully invested in their roles. They don't act them; they embody them. And just like Barton, with a little help from the Coens, we may slip inside some of their minds.

Barton Fink is a story of solitude, brought about by the things we love to do, no matter how much pain they may cause us. It's a cautionary tale about the perils of young and naive idealism, and the effects Hollywood may have on this mindset. It's a self-aware indictment of the writers who dream to change Hollywood with their works, and of those who stranglehold the writers into performing tasks that may be impossible. Barton may himself be a subtle poke at the Coens' own Hollywood underpinnings; and then, like him, they are guilty of having their own foolish ambitions. But then, so too is Hollywood guilty of driving Barton into a corner, crushing his ambitions and taking everything he has. He is mentally torn apart. And as his world falls apart, the wallpaper peeling away like the decaying of his mind, the viewer is slowly projected into a hellish dreamscape. Whether anything is real or not, it doesn't matter; by the end,  Barton Fink has made sure the audience is as scrambled and disturbed as Barton. Check in to the Hotel Earle again, and it will lead you into the world of the mind once more. Thoroughly introspective, thought-provoking, surrealistic, and including a deep wit, Barton Fink represents a profound success of cinema.

Four Creepy-as-Hell Hotel Hallways out of Four:

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Original Trailer: