Fink’s a lot
Saturday afternoon, nothing worth watching on telly, so what better than to slip a silver disc into the player and enjoy an hour or two of cinematic wonder. That’s what I thought, anyway. The chosen movie (Barton Fink (1991)) divided the camp somewhat. I found it a thought-provoking, gorgeous piece of cinema. The Divine P (my good lady) thought it was ‘a bloody weird movie’. She has a point, although were I to use her critique, it wouldn’t occupy a lot of space.
The film begins in New York. Barton Fink (John Turturro) has seen his play open to public and critical acclaim. He is obsessed with the idea of bringing theatre to ‘the common man’ and that ‘writing comes from a great inner pain’. He is also an asocial nerd, who will let rip with a rant about his ‘art’ at the drop of a hat. He is, in short, far from the common man he champions. Fink is persuaded to move to Los Angeles for a while by his agent, and checks in to the Hotel Earle, his base for writing movies. Things go OK. He settles in, meets up with producer Jack Lipnick (a brilliantly insane Michael Lerner) and is offered a script there and then to write a wrestling movie. A guaranteed payday of $1,000 per week, but for one small problem – he gets writer’s block. One day, while staring at his typewriter, he hears a commotion from the room next to his. He calls reception to complain, and the noisy neighbour knocks on his door to apologize. This is how he meets Charlie Meadows (John Goodman) – and a more honest, hard-working man you couldn’t wish to meet.
From this point onwards, it gets a little strange. This is where opinion became divided, really. It does begin very slowly, and some may find it a little too much. For the naturally curious such as myself, this is a good thing, as it draws you almost imperceptibly into the story. My main gripe would be just how bloody irritating Fink can be, but then he’s supposed to be. The final third of the film has much more going for it visually, and the change of pace does not seem to jar or be in any way obvious.
I was surprised on thinking back just how few actors they managed to get away with and still tell such a broad tale. Fink and Meadows get the lion’s share of screen time. The rest of the cast is not in it for long. Some good performances all round, but many of them too short. I’d like to have seen their characters developed a bit more, but then, when you realize what the film is really about, they are quite superficial. Steve Buscemi gets the shortest straw, with what seems like 30 seconds of screen time and a couple of phone calls. Shame.
Cinematically, it’s a joy. The gorgeous cinematography of Roger Deakins will be familiar to anyone who has seen anything by directors Joel and Ethan Coen before. He worked with them on The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), Fargo (1996) and The Big Lebowski (1998). Barton Fink precedes all these but Deakins’s stamp is all over it. Rich, lurid colours offset by dark, gloomy scenes which almost instantly clash with harsh daylight. In these days, when being a clever dick with a camera may be all that’s needed to get acclaim, Deakins obviously puts a lot of thought into his creations. Some of the camera angles and set pieces you simply wouldn’t see aywhere else.
Why is it so contentious? Well, that really would be telling. Suffice to say that what starts out as the slowly unfolding tale of a New York writer trying to write a simple screenplay for a wrestling movie takes a rather nasty turn into the bizarre and symbolic. It’s a great movie, although there’s the very real possibility that you may come away from it scratching your head. This said, I would still wholeheartedly recommend you give it a chance.
116 mins.
