Thoughts on Barton Fink

I rewatched Barton Fink on Christmas last year, and I hadn’t seen it in many years. It’s a 1991 film by the Coen Brothers, a dark comedy (though I mistakenly remembered it as horror) where John Turturro plays a 1940s NYC playwright named Barton Fink (who looks like a cross between Jack Fisk in Eraserhead and stereotypical “New York Jewish guy” looks) who strikes it big with a hit play (a serious play about the “common working man”) and gets tapped by Hollywood to be put up in an L.A. hotel to write the script for a B-level wrestling picture.

He’s this guy who seems completely up his own ass, talking about the “common man” in a really patronizing way, as he is far removed from them as an isolated nerdy writer, and is unable to just write a basic script for a B-movie, overthinking it to the point where he has writer’s block. His world gets blown up by his neighbor, played by John Goodman, who completely steals the movie and should have gotten an Oscar nomination for this film instead of Michael Lerner (though Goodman did get recognized by other award ceremonies at the time). Goodman is a talkative and charismatic insurance salesman who finds Barton Fink fascinating as a writer, and they quickly bond, though it’s not without its complications.

I really adored this movie, it’s dark and weird and just the hotel itself is like a character in the film, it has this rundown, creepy vibe to it that made it feel more like a dream world removed from reality.

I read that Jon Polito wanted to play the movie studio boss, as it was more natural fit for his style of being loud and blustery and crass, but Frances McDormand encouraged him to take the role of a meeker, quieter studio assistant, more in deference to his boss while trying to guide Fink on how to address him. He did well, but one could definitely feel that it took more work for him to restrain himself like that in the role.

I had forgotten who played the female lead, and mistakenly thought it was Jennifer Jason Leigh as the secretary to a perpetually drunk Faulkner-like writer (John Mahoney), but it was Judy Davis, who was great in this and nailed the 1940s look and Southern accent. But I was very close, as in the IMDB trivia, it said that Leigh did audition for that role, and I assume the Coens kept that audition in their pocket for when they cast her in The Hudsucker Proxy (which is set in 1957 but seemed like it should have been set in the 1940s) as a Rosalind Russell/Katharine Hepburn journalist type.