A deep dive into the life of the mind—or at least the minds of Joel and Ethan Coen, circa 1991. For their fourth film, about a pretentious playwright (John Turturro) who goes to 1940s Hollywood to write a wrestling picture, the Coens turn inward, offering a baroque consideration of creative integrity and artistic egomania. (Ironically—or maybe not—it won three top awards at Cannes.) There are times when Barton Fink might be too clever for its own good, slipping in pieces to a puzzle that only the Coens can complete, yet formally they’re at the top of their game. The Hotel Earle—the shabby, purgatorial mausoleum Barton chooses to stay in so he can be in touch with the “common man”—is a putrid playground for their camera, which floats down the endless halls, Shining-style, past the shoes left out for the porter to polish by ghostly guests we never see. And the performances by Turturro, as Barton, and John Goodman, as the traveling insurance salesman staying in the next room, are among the best in the Coen canon. Turturro’s sniveling artiste is pathetically funny (and perhaps a bit of self-critique on the filmmakers’ parts?), while also being sympathetic, considering he’s trapped in a moral conundrum of his own making. Goodman, meanwhile, makes Charlie Meadows—the movie’s grinning everyman and possibly its literal devil—both the film’s warm-hearted center and its gaping abyss. We may not ever be entirely sure what the Coens are up to in Barton Fink, but whatever it is, Goodman is more than game.
