TBR: 'Barton Fink'

This week on Instant NetFlix: “Barton Fink”

After seeing the Coen Bros. newest film, “A Serious Man,” I realized one thing was missing – besides an enjoyable script – and that’s Jesus. Not the savior, king of kings. Rather, it was missing Jesus Quintana, the pederast from “The Big Lebowski.”

A lot of Coen regulars were missing in their newest movie, John Turturro being most missed by this reviewer (though Steve Buscemi’s long absence is getting more unnerving than his bulbous eyes).

So today, we travel back to 1991, for an earlier and funnier Team Coen work called “Barton Fink,” starring Turturro and John Goodman.

Turturro plays Barton Fink, a writer in 1941 New York whose play has opened to critical acclaim. But Fink is obsessed with creating a new theater for “the common man.”

He gets an offer to move to Hollywood and earn some coin writing mass-produced B-movies for a studio. Fink thinks he’s selling out, but he begrudgingly accepts. His contempt for Hollywood introduces his biggest flaw: a superiority complex. Despite claiming to hate critical accolades, Fink carries a cross for his self-perceived genius.

When he arrives in Hollywood, Fink meets two welcome faces in a bombastic John Goodman (playing Charlie Meadows) and the always idiosyncratic Steve Buscemi (playing Chet!).

Meadows is a loud, rural foil to Fink’s coddled, New York introversion. He provides Fink with everything necessary for understanding the common man, but Fink writes him off as a rube, only stopping to listen when Meadows offers aw-shucks praise for being a big Hollywood writer.

His purported disdain for Hollywood flicks is the first piece of evidence that he doesn’t understand common folk. They like movies and they want to be Hollywood stars. He’s oblivious to the fact that his theater for the common man has already been created, and he’s working for it.

But when his attempts to write an assigned “wrestler picture” fail to produce anything more than a paragraph of a “Raging Bull” rip-off, he starts to seek advice – not from his should-be muse Meadows, but from a detached, famous novelist he stumbles upon in a Vomitorium.

W.P. Mayhew (played by John Mahoney) is an alcoholic womanizer somewhere between Ernest Hemingway and Foghorn Leghorn – though the Coens are rumored to have based him on William Faulkner.

The film finds Fink following the familiar path of all Coen Bros. movies: A quirky protagonist gets caught in a situation way weirder and more complicated than he can handle. He’s in over his head, and he keeps sinking. (re: “Blood Simple,” “The Big Lebowski,” “A Serious Man,” et al.)

An irredeemable antagonist, or team of antagonists, plumbs the void where morality should be. Generally, this is some symbolic representation of the devil, from the hitman odd couple of “Fargo,” to Anton Chigurh’s Grim Reaper in “No Country For Old Men” to the literal but unseen Lucifer in “A Serious Man.” It is almost as literal in “Barton Fink,” but you’ll have to descend through the inferno’s rings to find out for yourself.

Along the way, the “hero” meets a motley gang of plucky side-caricatures who fill time before an enigmatic ending.

It’s formulaic for the Coens, but that’s not to say it’s easy.

Just like Fink was given all the ingredients to write his assigned wrestler pic – a dame, a man in tights – but he still can’t do it.

The Coens have a lackluster catalogue, ranging from garbage like “The Ladykillers” and “Intolerable Cruelty” to classics like “O Brother Where Art Thou?,” “Fargo,” and “No Country for Old Men.”

“Barton Fink” falls somewhere above the inane-but-amusing “Burn After Reading” and somewhere below the infinitely quotable “The Big Lebowski.” It’s a curious creature, both funny and sarcastically self-referential while retaining a darkness at home in the Coen pantheon.

While Fink might seem like a miserable sod, his neuroses serve as hilarious critiques for haute writers. Even funnier than that archetype are the scene-heists of Michael Lerner (playing a fast-talking producer whose money and nationalism is only exceeded by his ADHD-fueled impatience) and Tony Shaloub (playing a jaded, hard-scrabble executive straight out a dime detective novel).

Inevitably, “A Serious Man” will disappoint you. Critics, working on deadlines, were so afraid they didn’t “get it,” they praised it with obfuscations like “It will raise a lot of questions.” That movie will certainly raise the question, “Are you f**king serious?” but the scattered laughs and cryptic biblical parallels aren’t enough for it to compete with the Coens finer ventures.

“Barton Fink” is one of those ventures. Pop it into your queue tonight and get Finked up.

Next week: TBR's Thanksgiving tribute to zombie movies