Barton Fink

BARTON FINK IS A YOUNG, SERIOUS writer in Hollywood during the 40s and is going to write a screenplay for a fourth-rate film about wrestling. Completely uninspired he is sweating in front of his typewriter in his miserable hotel-room when he starts to spend more and more time with his talkative neighbor Charlie Meadows, who shows him the darker sides of wrestling - and life. The film won the Golden Palm in Cannes 1991.
Comment:
FILM IS A MEDIUM FOR DREAMS. Film communicates dreams and realizes dreams - in more than one way. It's not a coincidence, then, that this year's most dreamlike film, Barton Fink, ironically comments on Hollywood, the greatest dream factory of all.
On a purely fictional level we're at a marketplace for myths. Joel and Ethan Coen's hero is a young literary talent from New York who gets lost in the corridors of the dream factory. He loses himself and his creative powers in his confrontation with the self-interested ''dress-for-success'' politics dominating the producer's offices and the life by the swimming-pool, beneath Hollywood's eternal sun.
A whole chapter in Hollywood's history could be dedicated to its humiliating treatment of some of the most prominent writers in the US, from Faulkner and Scott Fitzgerald to Raymond Chandler, Nathanael West or John Fante. The exploitation can be likened with a Sado-Masochistic ritual. Barton Fink appears to have borrowed some traits from the 40s playwright Clifford Odets, a radical poet who tried to put the drama of the ordinary citizen on stage but who almost lost his identiry in the capital of dreams.
But Barton Fink is not a ''key movie''. Hollywood is for the Coen brothers more a state of mind than a geographical, social and economic reality. Hollywood is only the set for an existential drama behind locked doors. It's a set-piece world, transformed to a prison. An isolation cell where the agony seems to be steaming from the walls, threatening to dissolve the illusive reality and where the surrounding makes itself known by hallucinatory phantoms or unusually lively intruders.
Barton Fink is a nightmarish vision with unexpected comical aspects. It puts the viewer in a state of total insecurity and constant amazement. And the feeling of suspense lingers on when the last suggestive image has faded out.
The film is like a challenging and daring debut with its hazardous bravery, its fantasy, and strictly controlled imagery. It's a piece of work that an unestablished artist might detonate, out of spite or as a challenge. It's even more impressive, then, that the Coen brothers, nowadays accepted names in the commercial film industry, have dared to make this experiment. But, on the other hand, it might not have been possible without their previous three exercises in film.
Barton Fink is both a masterpiece and a maiden work.
In any case, the film sets the tone for a new beginning ._
STIG BJÖRKMAN

Medverkande
John Turturro, John Goodman, Judy Davis: Producent
Ethan Coen: Manus
Joel Cohen, Ethan Coen: Foto
Roger Deakins: Musik
Carter Burwell: Talat språk
English