![]() ![]() It represents less the actual lived experiences of the American working man than a ridiculously idealized progressive/Socialist fantasy of working-class nobility. Odets’ propaganda for the proletariat is otherwise hilariously dated. And though Barton Fink presents the Hollywood excursion of an Odets-like writer as a regrettable mistake, the best work Odets ever did was for the big-screen, specifically co-writing the screenplay for Sweet Smell Of Success. The purple poetry of his achingly sincere melodramas today radiate clunky self-parody rather than righteous rage. Odets is an irresistible satirical target for the Coens because he took himself incredibly seriously. The Coens’ black comedy opens with Fink in a moment of neurotic triumph as critics and audiences swoon over his latest hymn to the fishmongers and laborers of the world. But before Barton Fink (John Turturro) fails spectacularly in Los Angeles, he triumphs in New York. Hail Caesar is about the ultimate insider while Barton Fink is about an outsider in a strange land, a man whose fierce if hypocritical code of ethics means nothing to the sausage-fingered vulgarians he works with. ![]() Hail Caesar, in sharp contrast, is as Christian as the Coen Brothers get.īarton Fink and Hail Caesar riff extensively on real-life show-business figures but Barton Fink centers on a man of ferocious inaction, a scribe who has temporarily lost contact with his muse, while Hail Caesar is about a man of action, a fixer whose existential purpose in life is to get things done. Barton Fink is an inveterately Jewish film about Jewish studio executives and Jewish leftist activism and the rich, complicated history of Jewish writers being used and abused by Hollywood. But the film is also linked inextricably to another Coen Brothers movie, Hail Caesar.īarton Fink and Hail Caesar function beautifully as companion films defined as much by their differences as their similarities. So Barton Fink’s strange legacy is tethered forever to the more ambitious film the Coens were writing when they decided to take a break and work on this weird, small little story about the gothic comeuppance of a self-styled poet of the common man. Barton Fink semi-famously began life as the script Joel and Ethan Coen wrote while struggling to finish the screenplay for Miller’s Crossing. It’s a product of writer’s block that perhaps not coincidentally is about a ferocious case of writer’s block experienced by a painfully earnest, agonizingly sincere playwright based on Clifford Odets after he follows the money trail from dynamic, gritty, real New York to the sunny den of spiritual corruption and soiled innocence that is Hollywood, USA. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |