Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

A creepy satire and real head-scratcher. To say that the Coen brothers ("Fargo"/"Raising Arizona"/"Blood Simple") bizarre parody of Hollywood goes off the deep end, is putting it mildly. It shifts at the half-way mark from a very funny insider Hollywood satire into a dark and disturbing psychodrama, a sudden transition that just didn't work. But the folks at Cannes fell in love with it, as it unprecedentedly won Best Picture, Director and Actor (John Turturro).

In 1941 NYC playwright Barton Fink (John Turturro) gets rave reviews for his play about an ordinary fish-monger and is lured to Hollywood with the promise of fame, fortune and a chance to reach the masses with his honest efforts to portray regular folks. Barton's signed to be a writer for Capital Picture's boorish vulgarian head Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner), who assigns him to write a screenplay for a wrestling movie for Wallace Beery. While in LA, the studio puts Barton up in the seedy Earle Hotel, where his neighbor and soon to be best friend is a folksy overfriendly hard-drinking regular working-class guy--an insurance salesman named Charlie Meadows (John Goodman).

Suffering from writer's block, Barton recruits the Southern literary giant W.P. Bill Mayhew (John Mahoney) for assistance. His fellow studio contract writer is a disappointment, as he's a drunk and offers no help. But help arrives from Bill's live-in girlfriend and secretary Audrey (Judy Davis), who claims to have ghost-written all of Bill's scripts and seems quite capable of also handling her difficult writer (though she can't stop him from being an alcoholic) and the awkward Barton's sexual advances.

Then come the weird narrative twists, plunging Barton into a surreal nightmare that Francis Bacon could dig, and it results in an ambiguous ending that's open to all sorts of interpretations about why the brothers were so mean to Barton and what the hell were they actually trying to say about such things as Hollywood, writers and life.

Turturro's character is based on well-meaning leftist intellectual Broadway playwright Clifford Odets, who was later blacklisted. Lerner's character is a combination of Jewish studio moguls Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn. While Mahoney's character is a dead ringer for writer William Faulkner, who did spend some time in Hollywood.

The acting is superb, the directing is assured and the film's look is pleasingly stylish. It works well on numerous levels, but the relentless skewering of Odets was a hatchet job and left the brothers open to criticism for being so smug. It allows us to think that the brothers think of themselves as acclaimed playwright Odets' superiors and that they know the 'common man' better and what he wants to see than those darn intellectuals, who led sheltered lives like Barton Fink.

REVIEWED ON 4/4/2011       GRADE: B

Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"

© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED   DENNIS SCHWARTZ