![]() ![]() Stifling his contempt for the base art form known as "the pictures," Barton heeds his agent's advice to move to Los Angeles and take a paying contract with a major Hollywood studio. He can speak for the average working class bloke on the street, but he certainly isn't going to be one. John Turturro stars as the title character, a pretentious New York playwright who fancies himself both the voice of the common man and a member of the rarified intellectual elite at the same time, so blinded by his own arrogance that he sees no contradiction in these two attitudes. The story is set in 1941, between World Wars. (That hairdo is pretty telling.) These things shouldn't work together, but the Coens have a strong vision that puts each puzzle piece in the right place. The characters patter as if in a Preston Sturges comedy, yet the hero winds up experiencing a closed-room psychological meltdown a la Roman Polanski with touches of horror surrealism by way of David Lynch. ![]() ![]() However, even more than their earlier works, this film is a mash-up of multiple disparate styles that might otherwise seem unresolvable when put together, but somehow coalesce into something decidedly the Coens' own. That's not to say that Barton Fink is without any obvious influences. That attitude started to change when their fourth film, Barton Fink, swept three top prizes (Best Director, Best Actor and the Palme d'Or) at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, finally entrenching the Coen brothers as genuine American auteurs. This complaint was unfair even at the time, but many critics of the day had trouble parsing the Coens' evolving style. For the most part, all of them were received well by critics, though often with a reservation that the brothers were more concerned with imitating the work of others than creating something original of their own. Their first three features were, respectively, a noir thriller, a screwball comedy and a period gangster drama. Early in their careers, Joel and Ethan Coen made a point of jumping from film genre to film genre, each different than the last but all inspired by classic Hollywood. ![]()
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