DVD Review: Barton Fink

Revenge is a dish best served cold, and rarely has it tasted sweeter than in Barton Fink (1991), the Coen Brothers' counter-attack on cutthroat Hollywood - that alternative universe where the phrase ‘high concept' denotes a film that can be summed up in a sentence and where - as Marilyn Monroe put it - "they'll pay you a thousand bucks for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul".

With this, their fourth film, Joel and Ethan Coen came out firing on all cylinders. It stands with Mulholland Drive and Sunset Boulevard as one of finest films ever to peel back the botoxed, bed-tanned skin of Hollywood and reveal the bowel movements and broken dreams beneath.

The film is set in the 1930s, when the dream factory was at the peak of its economic powers, and Barton Fink (a career-defining John Turturro) is its hapless protagonist.

An earnest left-wing playwright whose plays about ‘the common man' have achieved some critical success, Barton is lured from New York to California like a lamb to the slaughter with the promise of a broader audience for his soapbox operas and a decidedly uncommon paycheck.

"We want that Barton Fink feeling!" hollers Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner), the boorish studio mogul who takes Barton under his wing, before assigning him a Wallace Beery wrestling picture - a project with all the creative potential of a toothpaste-commercial.

As writer's block ensues, the world around Barton crumbles. He lives in a tomb-like hotel, where the walls sweat and breathe in the California heat and the only other person who's ever home is Charlie Meadows (John Goodman), a crass, overweight life-insurance salesman who repeatedly hints that he would have a few stories to tell Barton if his interest in ‘the common man' was anything more than a bluff.

He seeks out his literary hero Bill Mayhew, another writer who has made the Faustian Hollywood pact (John Mahoney is a dead ringer for William Faulkner in this role), to ask him for advice, and finds that his idol has become more beast than man, throwing up his eighty-proof breakfast in a public toilet and abusing his ‘secretary', who now writes most of his scripts.

Things soon become very strange indeed. In the third act, the Coen Brothers literally turn up the heat, and Barton's delirium becomes the driving force of the narrative. There is fire and retribution. There are fascists and FBI men. There is an important package, which may or may not contain a human head.

There is even a wrestling script, written, for better or worse, with that ‘Barton Fink feeling'. And finally there is the film's strangely beautiful, almost (but not entirely) mystifying conclusion.

This being a Coen Brothers film, the script is razor-sharp, the acting is impeccable and the direction is effortlessly inventive. It swept the Cannes Film Festival, winning prizes for best film, director and actor - an unprecedented haul.

And yet now, as the Coens become unwitting industry darlings in the wake of their 2008 Oscar wins, it is rarely mentioned except as a back-catalogue oddity. This is a shame, because while it might be their most difficult film, it is also one of their most rewarding.

Unlike the gimmicky Coen Brothers-lite (Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers) that was starting to look ominously ubiquitous until No Country for Old Men came out last year, Barton Fink is relentless, focused and entirely original.