Barton Fink
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Barton Fink is a 1991 American period film written, produced, directed and edited by the Coen brothers. Set in 1941, it stars John Turturro in the title role as a young New York City playwright who is hired to write scripts for a film studio in Hollywood, and John Goodman as Charlie Meadows, the insurance salesman who lives next door at the run-down Hotel Earle.
The Coens wrote the screenplay for Barton Fink in three weeks while experiencing difficulty during the writing of Miller's Crossing. They began filming the former soon after Miller's Crossing was finished. The film is influenced by works of several earlier directors, particularly Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) and The Tenant (1976).
Barton Fink had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1991. In a rare sweep, it won the Palme d'Or, as well as awards for Best Director and Best Actor (Turturro). Although the film was a box office disappointment, only grossing $6 million against its $9 million budget, it received positive reviews and was nominated for 3 Academy Awards. Prominent themes of Barton Fink include the writing process; slavery and conditions of labor in creative industries; superficial distinctions between high culture and low culture; and the relationship of intellectuals with "the common man".
The diverse elements of the film have led it to defy efforts at genre classification, with the work being variously referred to as a film noir, a horror film, a Künstlerroman, and a buddy film. It contains various literary allusions and religious overtones, as well as references to many real-life people and events – most notably the writers Clifford Odets and William Faulkner, of whom the characters of Barton Fink and W. P. Mayhew, respectively, are often seen as fictional representations. Several features of the film's narrative, particularly an image of a woman at the beach which recurs throughout, have sparked much commentary, with the Coens acknowledging some intentional symbolic elements while denying an attempt to communicate any single message in the film. Despite disagreement over certain details of the work, Barton Fink continues to be positively received, with screenwriter Charlie Kaufman among its admirers.
Plot
In 1941, up-and-coming Broadway playwright Barton Fink (Turturro) accepts a contract from Capitol Pictures in Hollywood to write film scripts for a thousand dollars per week. Upon moving to Los Angeles, Fink settles into the cheap Hotel Earle. His room's only decoration is a small painting of a woman on the beach, arm raised to block the sun. Fink is assigned to a wrestling film by his new boss Jack Lipnick (Lerner), but he finds difficulty in writing for the unfamiliar subject. He is distracted by sounds coming from the room next door, and he phones the front desk to complain. His neighbor, Charlie Meadows (Goodman), is the source of the noise and visits Fink to apologize. As they talk, Fink proclaims his affection for "the common man", and Meadows describes his life as an insurance salesman.
[[File:John Goodman 1989.jpg|thumb|upright|left|The Coen brothers wrote the role of Charlie Meadows for actor John Goodman, in part because of the "warm and friendly image that he projects for the viewer".
