There�s so much you could say about this Coen picture and I would almost certainly end up running myself in circles before needing an icepack to the head if I even attempted to cover all the various themes and ideas running through it. So I�ll start with the basic plot, which is, in itself, enjoyable enough. Plus you get the usual impeccable script and lovely camera movement. John Turturro plays Fink, a New York playwright with a burning passion to write theatre for the common man. However, after his latest play receives critical acclaim he is persuaded to take up a lucrative contract with Capitol Pictures and move to Los Angeles to write for the movies.
Unfortunately his first contract is to rattle off a script for a wrestling picture, not exactly in his field and he almost immediately suffers from writers� block. Thinks aren�t helped by his accommodation, a cheap, damp hotel room in the eerie Hotel Earle. As he inches closer to his deadline yet still is unable to write anything, he meets various strange characters (as you would expect from the Coen brothers) such as the insurance salesman (John Goodman) who lives next door and a once-great drunken author, not to mention his bizarre studio employers. There�s a host of mouth-watering performances from Turturro (edgy, introverted yet passionate), Goodman (sympathetic, affable but flawed) and Michael Lerner (just plain mad) as the studio head who �takes an interest� in Barton�s work.
The movie admittedly goes a bit odd at the end, with a completely unforeseeable chain of events making Barton�s life even more difficult. However to say it couldn�t be expected is to ignore the multi-layered themes and indicators in everything that has gone before, it�s exactly where the story has been leading, I (and I assume the majority of viewers) just missed it all or didn�t quite add it up right. Perhaps we, like Barton, just never listened.
So on second viewing and at the expense of several hours of elliptical thought, so many points become obvious. Barton signing his soul away to the city of Lost Angels, living in a baking hotel with a bellboy from the underworld, flaming walls and with a devil in the next room who�s mere presence peels wallpaper. Barton knows his writing comes from the soul, unlike the infuriating W.P.Mayhew and in giving that to the studio his creativity runs dry. His role as Daniel, asked to interpret the dreams of the ignorant king Nebuchadnezzar of his studio, walking a mile in another man�s shoes, constant references to keeping your head and the fact we only hear a couple of lines of Barton's two works, both of which are exactly the same ending. And all that probably just brushes the surface. Just watch it. At least twice. |
