| | | Between Heaven and Hell There's Always Hollywood!
Features: DVD
John Turturro shines in the lead role in Barton Fink the Coen Brothers' (Miller's Crossing, Fargo) hilarious satire set in the 1940s Hollywood. Fink is a New York playwright who reluctantly relocates to Hollywood to write screenplays. Ordered to write a low budget screenplay about wrestling, Fink manages to type one sentence and then...nothing! Although his chatty insurance salesman neighbor Charlie (John Goodman) helps out by teaching Fink about wrestling, the clock ticks, the temperature rises, and Fink's life spins more and more out of control.
"One of the smartest comedies America has produced in years." Bob Strauss, LA Daily News
Editor's Note
BARTON FINK is the Coen brothers' apocalyptic masterpiece about the creative process. John Turturro stars as the title character, an idealistic young man with an ERASERHEAD-like do who believes that writing should be about the living truth, revealing the hopes, the dreams, the tragedies of the common man. When Hollywood comes calling for him to write a wrestling picture for Wallace Beery, Fink suddenly finds himself in Los Angeles with a severe case of writer's block, unable to combine his deep-seated ethics with Hollywood's desire to just make a buck. Fast-talking mogul Jack Lipnick (a terrific Michael Lerner) sets Barton up at the Hotel Earle, where the writer meets up with Charlie Meadows (John Goodman), a traveling insurance salesman who is ready to fill Barton's head with tales of the common man--but Fink is too busy espousing his defense of the common man to actually listen to him. So Barton seeks to find the answers in W.P. Mayhew (John Mahoney), a Faulkneresque novelist who has sacrificed his morals for the B-pictures and the bottle. When the disillusioned Fink finds himself part of a murder investigation, all hell breaks loose. Joel and Ethan Coen's BARTON FINK is a multilayered, complex psychological study of the creative mind that is as frightening and bizarre as it is hysterically funny.
Plot Summary
BARTON FINK is steeped in homage, to everything from Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING to Roman Polanski's THE TENANT, in which inanimate objects (hotels, apartments) represent the decaying mind of the protagonist. Like Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) at the haunted Overlook Hotel, Barton is at the Hotel Earle to write but is having problems. The wallpaper keeps falling down, oozing out a sticky substance (brain matter?) as weird noises and whispers appear to come from nowhere and everywhere. Director of photography Roger Deakins takes long shots of the narrow hallway, filled with shoes to be shined, that echo Kubrick's long shots of the Overlook hallways. With the many references to the mind and the head, the screenplay imagines Barton's hotel room as the inner workings of his decaying mind, as Roman Polanski did with the apartment in THE TENANT. And the hotel itself might just be hell; when Barton first enters the seemingly vacant, rotting hotel and rings the bell, Chet (Coen regular Steve Buscemi) comes up from a trap door in the floor as if he has emerged from the bowels of the underworld. The wrestling picture that is screened for Barton to give him ideas is called DEVIL ON THE CANVAS. Next-door neighbor Charlie Meadows (John Goodman) sweats more and more as the film continues, getting hotter and hotter, and is always throwing around the words "damn," "hell," and "Jesus." Finally, the painting on the wall over the typewriter that Barton stares into longingly shows a woman on a beautiful beach, where the soothing waves seem to be audible; it is as if that picture represents the heavenly world outside while Barton is trapped in the hell inside. The Coen brothers wrote BARTON FINK in about three weeks while unable to complete the screenplay for MILLER'S CROSSING; it seems that their severe case of writer's block put them through their own personal hell, ending in a fiery finale of creativity run amok.
| Features | Subtitles: English, Spanish | | Theatrical Trailer | | Still Gallery | | Audio: English Dolby Digital Stereo; Spanish, French Digital Mono | | Interactive Menus | | Scene Selection | | 8 Deleted Scenes |
| Technical Info
|
Release Information
| | Studio: Foxvideo |
| Release Date: 6/12/2007 |
| Running Time: 116 minutes |
| Original Release Date: 1991 | | Catalog ID: 2007380 | | UPC: 00024543073802 | | Number of Discs: 1 |
Audio & Video
| | Original Language: English | | Available Audio Tracks: English [CC], English, French Dubbed, Spanish Dubbed | | Available Subtitles: English, Spanish | | Video: Color |
Aspect Ratio | | 1.66:1 |
| Cast & Crew
| Awards |
Oscar (1992) | | | Michael Lerner, Nominee, Best Actor in a Supporting Role | | | Dennis Gassner, Nancy Haigh, Nominee, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration | | | Richard Hornung, Nominee, Best Costume Design | |
Cannes Film Festival (1991) |  | John Turtorro, Winner, Best Actor | | Joel Coen, Winner, Best Director | | Joel Coen, Winner, Golden Palm |
| Memorable Quotes| "I'm a writer."----Barton Fink (John Turturro) | | "Six, please."----Barton |"Next stop, six....This stop, six."----Elevator operator (There is no other dialogue in the elevator scene in order to illuminate the three sixes----the mark of the devil.) | | "The common man will still be here when you get back."----Garland Stanford (David Warrilow) to Barton, trying to convince the writer to accept the Hollywood deal | | "We're only interested in one thing: Can you tell a story, Bart? Can you make us laugh? Can you make us cry? Can you make us want to break out in joyous song? Is that more than one thing? OK!"----Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner) to Barton | | "I could tell you stories to curl your hair but it looks like you've already heard them."----Insurance salesman Charlie Meadows (John Goodman) to Barton, who isn't really listening to Charlie anyway; Charlie, meanwhile, insists that all he offers people is a little peace (piece?) of mind | | "Can't trade my head in for a new one."----Charlie |"I guess you're stuck with the one you got."----Barton|"We gotta keep our heads."----Charlie to Barton | | "Escape----it's when I can't write and escape myself and wanna rip my head off and run screaming through the streets."----W.P. Mayhew (John Mahoney) to Barton Fink | | "Where there's a head there's hope."----Charlie to Barton | | "Right now the contents of your head are the property of Capitol Pictures."----Lou Breeze (Jon Polito) to Barton | | "Look upon me! Look upon me! I'll show you the life of the mind!"----Charlie |
|
| | Professional Reviews | Rolling Stone
"...Partly hilarious, partly horrific, totally mesmerizing..." 08/22/1991 p.71-2Sight and Sound
"...The Coens share with Lynch an ability to find brilliant aural and tactile devices to suggest a world gone awry..." 02/01/1992 p.39-40 USA Today
"...Surreal and sometimes sublime..." 08/21/1991 p.4D Los Angeles Times
"...[The Coens] are filmmakers of considerable ability. Their scripts are invariably clever and bemused, with a wised-up quality all their own..." 08/21/1991 p.F1 Chicago Sun-Times 9 of 10
Barton Fink won this year's Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and an unprecedented two more prizes as well, for director and actor. Since Cannes juries traditionally limit themselves to one award per film, their ecstasy would seem to indicate Barton Fink is one of the greatest films ever made. It is not. But it's an assured piece of comic filmmaking, and perhaps a warning by the Coens to themselves about what can happen when brilliant young talents from the East make that trek out to the land of the guys behind the desks. - Roger Ebert
|
| |
|
|
|
