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Barton Fink Customer Reviews (1 - 3 of 43 Reviews)

THE BEST COEN MOVIE
Barton Fink is one of my favorites movies ever and the best film from the Coen Brothers. It's funny and darkly, elegant and vanguardist. John Turturo, John Goodman and Judy Davis are greats. A Masterpiece!

More like a lifetime- and no wrestling movie!
Barton Fink is a newly successful Broadway playwright suckered into signing on as a Hollywood studio writer. His Louis B. Meyer/Sam Goldwyn composite executive orders him to produce the script for a "wrestling movie" with "that Barton Fink touch." The hapless playwright becomes a victim of writer's block and a huge old pile of a hotel which suggests you can stay "a day or a lifetime."

Therein lies the problem of this rather dry and dull film. It may only be a few hours long but it seems like a lifetime. In the lead, John Turturro is more annoying than sympathetic. Great small roles for John Goodman, Steve Bucemi, and Tony Shalhoub still fail to bring the dusty edifice to life. In fact, probably deliberately, the film has the oppressive darkness of that death's-antechamber-as-hotel in Bergman's 'Silence'.

Throughout this enigmatic and glacially-paced opus, we are never quite sure where reality lies. Great cinema or just pretentious and dull?

On the whole, Fink has moments. Michael Lerner is superb as the studio executive. The studio's boozy, wenching great-author-in-residence is a wonderful Faulkner send-up. But, the Coen brothers run hot and cold with their films and this one is not at the top of their list.

Other reviewers apparently disagree. They see genius where I saw only oppressive, ponderous plot. Maybe you need to decide for yourself.

Ooh the Irony
This is a movie with a weak plot about a screenwriter who can't think of a plot. He thinks he's brilliant, but is reprimanded by a the owner of the film company for writing a screenplay so intellectual it will go over most people's heads. Such irony.

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