Barton Fink

"I'm a writer, you monsters! I CREATE!"- Barton Fink

What a bizarre film. A hellish hotel and its resident fallen angel, bigshot Hollywood tycoons, bourgeois dreams masked poorly as proletariat sentiments. I cannot decide whether or not I liked Fink's character but that could well be the genius of the acting. Everyone is a caricature of a caricacture of themselves. How do I mean this? Everyone is larger than life, over-the-top, exaggerated: the good-cop-bad-cop routine is collapsed into an only-bad-cop routine; Chet, the hotel bellboy-cum-receptionist, is alarmingly friendly while the old elevator man is alarmingly silent; Fink is earnest and awkward but also pretentious, morally uptight and "does not listen"; Lipnick is a boisterous, bossy movie mogul typically more interested in the classical hollywood narrative (he kisses Fink's feet as a sign of his deep regret for offending him) than any sort of artistic value; Charlie is the madman next door with a conscience - he could've been bad but he turns out good and then becomes very very bad. There is certainly an element of stageishness here, the whole movie moves about like a dreamish nightmare, thick with symbolism, nudging the audience every few minutes about some underhand remark you've got to be quick enough to catch. German nazis and the Dutch ("Heil Hitler", Charlie says before putting a bullet between a cop's eyes; the Coens show how one man's madness can become another's political rally), World War II, artistic integrity and the large, looming discrepancy between Fink's idea of the common man's struggles and the reality of the backstage curtain-puller who'd rather read his newspaper than take audience with highbrow art.

Yup, it certainly is quite brilliant. Moody and dark, it moves at an almost sluggish pace. Scenes, objects and sequences that are at first disconnected eventually take on an evocative form of a larger, looming idea (but what kind of idea is this elusive and shadowy?). Part-fantasy, part-ghoulish, part-satire - I can't believe it took me this long to get around to Barton Fink.