Barton Fink (1991)
Directed by Joel Coen
A renowned New York playwright is enticed to California to write for the movies and discovers the hellish truth of Hollywood.
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5 films that influenced Barton Fink
What critics say influenced Barton Fink
The Coen brothers credit Argento's highly theatrical set designs as their inspiration for the breathing, moulting hotel walls in Barton Fink.
Fink then goes down the long, stretching, yellow-lighted hallways (which cause the hotel to resemble the Overlook in Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining"), enters his room, battles a mosquito and unpacks his typewriter, only to discover he has an enormous case of writer's block.
One of the few legitimate offshoots of David Lynch (its ethereal denouement is undercut by a curlicue similar to the mechanical bird with a worm in its mouth that neutralizes the bucolic epilogue of Lynch's Blue Velvet ), it's also a work of mordant self-flagellation: the Coens evince contempt for not only their profession (the illiterate head of the studio, Lipnick (Michael Lerner, the spitting image of past-his-prime David O. Selznick), dispenses hollow industry maxims ad hoc), but artists, too.
I'm not going to give away any more of the plot (the movie depends on surprise), but suffice to say that Barton Fink turns into the Coens' jokey, formalist version of Angel Heart, a metaphysical tale about a man trapped in his own private purgatorial maze.
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The film displays the superb atmospheric abilities brotherly team Joel and Ethan Coen also brought to "Blood Simple," "Raising Arizona" and "Miller's Crossing."
In “ Raising Arizona ,” it was Trey Wilson ’s furniture czar.
The Coens are the producing/directing/writing team that gave us "Blood Simple," "Raising Arizona" and "Miller's Crossing," all finely tuned, if eccentric takes on various genres.
After three movies in which they seemed to be finding their bearings ("Blood Simple," "Raising Arizona" and "Miller's Crossing"), the Coens have at last produced an unqualified winner.
What "Raising Arizona" was to baby lust, "Barton Fink" is to writer's block -- a rapturously funny, strangely bittersweet, moderately horrifying and, yes, truly apt description of the condition and its symptoms.