Since he’s based on William Faulkner, if that august name means nothing to you, it means he is a Southerner, and he gets rip-roaring drunk. To help him, a motormouth producer from the studio (Tony Shalhoub) gets him to speak to a great writer and respected screenwriter, William P Mayhew (John Mahoney), who is based on William Faulkner. That writer’s block is a bitch, isn’t it? At first, Barton is reluctant to engage with him, but once he gets on his hobby horse about how in touch he is with the common folk, the salt of the earth and the lumpenproles of the land, he comes to like Charlie, despite the fact that he keeps cutting him off and actually ignoring what he’s trying to say.īarton sees himself as living the life of the mind, as a creator who wrestles brilliant ideas into existence, and as a friend to the proletariat whose plight he champions and attempts to shepherd into the light with his writing. He’s after a bit of a chat and some company, and he tries to share a joke and a drink with the snobby writer, who looks down on him. Out of nowhere appears an overly friendly guy from the room adjacent, Charlie (John Goodman in all his sweaty glory). It’s a great oddball role, and probably one of the high points of Turturro’s career. The makers especially like putting him in this strange pose (both right at the film’s start as he’s watching his play, and when he’s watching the dailies from a wrestling picture), where he’s cinched up as if he’s has a stroke on one side of his body, hand clenched, as if he’s about to complain about something. He looks and acts like a bit of a freak at the best of times. To match that ball-squeezing metaphor, Fink’s kinky (as in, intensely curly, as opposed to sexually naughty) hair stands straight up, perched atop a huge set of round, black glasses calculated to make him look quite odd and owlish. A rampant case of writer’s block has seized him by the balls and won’t let go. All the while, his progress before the typewriter is stunted before he’s barely begun. The walls themselves ooze a fetid liquid, and the wallpaper, looking like human skin overflowing with leprosy, sloughs off in sheets.įink tries to combat the decay with persistence and pins, to little avail. ![]() ![]() Chet (Steve Buscemi) is the ever helpful, and decidedly odd bellboy / concierge who seems to be the only staff member in this hellish hotel.įink’s room, over the course of the film, is in the process of decomposing before our very eyes. The studio moves him into a hotel that, at first, looks pretty swanky. Fink is told to write the script to a wrestling movie because he knows the poetry of the streets, which precludes him from working on westerns, biblical or any other kind of story. He bellows out the phrase “The writer is KING at Capitol Pictures”, which is not likely to be true. The head of the studio, an over excited Michael Lerner, continually praises both Fink and writers in general. Somehow, this translates to him being snapped up by contract to Capitol Pictures, and shipped out to Los Angeles to work as a screenwriter. His most recent play is the toast of Broadway. All I will say is rarely is the link made so explicit as it is in Barton Fink, most of which is set in the Golden Age of Hollywood’s bright days prior to World War II.īarton Fink (John Turturro) is a New York playwright who’s hit the big time. I’m going to avoid rambling on about that theory too much, since I’m sure I’ve mentioned it at length in another Coen Brothers review found elsewhere on this illustrious site. But they are also almost always about Hollywood and movies. ![]() Sure, they’ve got characters and plots and set pieces and crafty dialogue. ![]() Their films thus far have generally been about films, on some level. It’s hard not to view some of the films the Coen Brothers have been responsible for more as experiments than films.
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