Barton Fink - WikiHQ

| released =

| runtime = 116 minutes

| country = United States

| language = English

| budget = $9 million

| gross = $6.2 million

Barton Fink is a 1991 American black comedy thriller film written, produced, edited and directed by the Coen brothers. Set in 1941, it stars John Turturro in the title role as a young New York City playwright who is hired to write scripts for a film studio in Hollywood, and John Goodman as Charlie Meadows, the insurance salesman who lives next door at the run-down Hotel Earle.

The Coens wrote the screenplay for Barton Fink in three weeks while experiencing writer's block during the writing of Miller's Crossing. They began filming soon after Miller's Crossing was finished. The film is influenced by works of several earlier directors, particularly Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) and The Tenant (1976).

Barton Fink had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1991. In a rare sweep, it won the Palme d'Or as well as awards for Best Director and Best Actor (Turturro). Although the film was a box office bomb, only grossing $6 million against its $9 million budget, it received positive reviews and was nominated for three Academy Awards.

Prominent themes of Barton Fink include the writing process; slavery and conditions of labor in creative industries; superficial distinctions between high culture and low culture; and the relationship of intellectuals with "the common man". The diverse elements of the film have led it to defy efforts at genre classification, with the work being variously referred to as a film noir, a horror film, a Künstlerroman, a postmodernist film and a buddy film. It contains various literary allusions and religious overtones, as well as references to many real-life people and events – most notably the writers Clifford Odets and William Faulkner, of whom the characters of Barton Fink and W. P. Mayhew, respectively, are often seen as fictional representations. Several features of the film's narrative, particularly an image of a woman at the beach which recurs throughout, have sparked much commentary, with the Coens acknowledging some intentional symbolic elements while denying an attempt to communicate any single message in the film.

Plot

In 1941, up-and-coming Broadway playwright Barton Fink accepts a contract from Capitol Pictures in Hollywood to write film scripts for a thousand dollars per week. Upon moving to Los Angeles, Fink settles into the cheap Hotel Earle. His room's only decoration is a small painting of a woman on the beach, arm raised to block the sun. Fink is assigned to a wrestling film by his new boss Jack Lipnick, but he finds difficulty in writing for the unfamiliar subject. He is distracted by sounds coming from the room next door, and he phones the front desk to alert them of the disturbing sounds. His neighbor, Charlie Meadows, the source of the noise, visits Fink to apologize. During their conversation, Fink proclaims his affection for "the common man", and Meadows describes his life as an insurance salesman.

[[File:John Goodman 1989.jpg|thumb|upright|The Coen brothers wrote the role of Charlie Meadows for actor John Goodman, in part because of the "warm and friendly image that he projects for the viewer". They went from Los Angeles to New York and began work on a different project.

thumb|left|The [[Coen brothers said of writing Barton Fink: "We didn't do any research, actually, at all."]]

In three weeks, the Coens wrote a script with a title role written specifically for actor John Turturro, with whom they'd been working on Miller's Crossing. The new film, Barton Fink, was set in a large, seemingly abandoned hotel.

The script served its diversionary purpose, and the Coens put it aside: "Barton Fink sort of washed out our brain and we were able to go back and finish Miller's Crossing." Once production of the first film was finished, the Coens began to recruit staff to film Barton Fink. Turturro looked forward to playing the lead role, and spent a month with the Coens in Los Angeles to coordinate views on the project: "I felt I could bring something more human to Barton. Joel and Ethan allowed me a certain contribution. I tried to go a little further than they expected."

While they worked with J. Todd Anderson to create detailed storyboards for Barton Fink, the Coens began looking for a new cinematographer, as Barry Sonnenfeld—who had shot their first three features—was committed to his own directorial debut, The Addams Family. The brothers eventually travelled to London to interview prospective directors of photography. Roger Deakins had impressed the Coens with his work, particularly the interior scenes of the 1988 film Stormy Monday. Joel Coen telephoned Roger Spottiswoode, the most recent director to work with Deakins (Air America, 1990), to ask his opinion of the DP. Spottiswoode had formed an intensely negative opinion of the cinematographer, telling Joel that Deakins insisted on operating the camera himself, refused to film with more than one camera, disliked multiple filming units and obsessively sought naturalistic lighting setups. Once Joel reported these criticisms to Ethan, and after screening other films Deakins had shot (including Sid and Nancy and Pascali's Island), the Coens sent the script to Deakins and invited him to join the project. Though his agent advised against working with the Coens, Deakins met with them at a café in Notting Hill and their collaboration began soon after.

Filming

thumb|right|Restaurant scenes set in New York at the start of Barton Fink were filmed inside the [[RMS Queen Mary|RMS Queen Mary ocean liner.]]

Principal photography began in June 1990 and took eight weeks (a third less time than required by Miller's Crossing), and the estimated final budget for the film was US$9 million. The Coens worked well with Deakins, and they easily translated their ideas for each scene onto film. "There was only one moment we surprised him," Joel Coen recalled later. An extended scene called for a tracking shot out of the bedroom and into a sink drain "plug hole" in the adjacent bathroom as a symbol of sexual intercourse. "The shot was a lot of fun and we had a great time working out how to do it," Joel said. "After that, every time we asked Roger to do something difficult, he would raise an eyebrow and say, 'Don't be having me track down any plug-holes now.

Three weeks of filming were spent in the Hotel Earle, a set created by art director Dennis Gassner. The film's climax required a huge spreading fire in the hotel's hallway, which the Coens originally planned to add digitally in post-production. When they decided to use real flames, however, the crew built a large alternative set in an abandoned aircraft hangar in Long Beach, California. A series of gas jets was installed behind the hallway, and the wallpaper was perforated for easy penetration. As Goodman ran through the hallway, a man on an overhead catwalk opened each jet, giving the impression of a fire racing ahead of Charlie. Each take required a rebuild of the apparatus, and a second hallway (sans fire) stood ready nearby for filming pick-up shots between takes. The final scene was shot near Zuma Beach, as was the image of a wave crashing against a rock.

The Coens edited the film themselves, as is their custom. "We prefer a hands-on approach," Joel explained in 1996, "rather than sitting next to someone and telling them what to cut." Because of rules for membership in film production guilds, they are required to use a pseudonym; "Roderick Jaynes" is credited with editing Barton Fink. Only a few filmed scenes were removed from the final cut, including a transition scene to show Barton's movement from New York to Hollywood. (In the film, this is shown enigmatically with a wave crashing against a rock.) Several scenes representing work in Hollywood studios were also filmed, but edited out because they were "too conventional".

Setting

[[File:EarleWallpaper.jpg|thumb|right|The peeling wallpaper in Barton's room was designed to mimic the pus dripping from Charlie's infected ear. Barton's room is sparsely furnished with two large windows facing another building. The Coens later described the hotel as a "ghost ship floating adrift, where you notice signs of the presence of other passengers, without ever laying eyes on any." In the film, residents' shoes are an indication of this unseen presence; another rare sign of other inhabitants is the sound from adjacent rooms. Joel said: "You can imagine it peopled by failed commercial travelers, with pathetic sex lives, who cry alone in their rooms."

Picture

[[File:Barton Fink pictures of women.jpg|thumb|right|Ethan Coen said in a 1991 interview that the woman on the beach in Barton's room (above) was meant to give a "feeling of isolation."

Later in the film, Barton places into the frame a small picture of Charlie, dressed in a fine suit and holding a briefcase. The juxtaposition of his neighbor in the uniform of an insurance salesman and the escapist image of the woman on the beach leads to a confusion of reality and fantasy for Barton. Critic Michael Dunne notes: "[V]iewers can only wonder how 'real' Charlie is. ... In the film's final shot ... viewers must wonder how 'real' [the woman] is. The question leads to others: How real is Fink? Lipnick? Audrey? Mayhew? How real are films anyway?"

The picture's significance has been the subject of broad speculation. The Washington Post reviewer Desson Howe said that despite its emotional impact, the final scene "feels more like a punchline for punchline's sake, a trumped-up coda." In her book-length analysis of the Coen brothers' films, Rowell suggests that Barton's fixation on the picture is ironic, considering its low culture status and his own pretensions toward high culture (speeches to the contrary notwithstanding). She further notes that the camera focuses on Barton himself as much as the picture while he gazes at it. At one point, the camera moves past Barton to fill the frame with the woman on the beach. This tension between objective and subjective points of view appears again at the end of the film, when Barton finds himself – in a sense – inside the picture.

Critic M. Keith Booker calls the final scene an "enigmatic comment on representation and the relationship between art and reality." He suggests that the identical images point to the absurdity of art which reflects life directly. The film transposes the woman directly from art to reality, prompting confusion in the viewer; Booker asserts that such a literal depiction therefore leads inevitably to uncertainty.

Genre

The Coens are known for making films that defy simple classification. Although they refer to their first film, Blood Simple (1984), as a relatively straightforward example of detective fiction, the Coens wrote their next script, Raising Arizona (1987), without trying to fit a particular genre. They decided to write a comedy but intentionally added dark elements to produce what Ethan calls "a pretty savage film." Their third film, Miller's Crossing (1990), reversed this order, mixing bits of comedy into a crime film. Yet it also subverts single-genre identity by using conventions from melodrama, love stories, and political satire.

This trend of mixing genres continued and intensified with Barton Fink (1991); the Coens insist the film "does not belong to any genre."

The Coens, however, have denied any intent to create a systematic unity from symbols in the film. "We never, ever go into our films with anything like that in mind," Joel said in a 1998 interview. "There's never anything approaching that kind of specific intellectual breakdown. It's always a bunch of instinctive things that feel right, for whatever reason." The Coens have noted their comfort with unresolved ambiguity. Ethan said in 1991: "Barton Fink does end up telling you what's going on to the extent that it's important to know ... What isn't crystal clear isn't intended to become crystal clear, and it's fine to leave it at that." Regarding fantasies and dream sequences, he said: