joel coen's BARTON FINK (1991)

Barton Fink confirms, as No Country attests, the Coens as mean sumbitches, meaner than they seem. Fink, written in the midst of Miller's Crossing writer's block, is above all an uncomfortably damning examination of the writing process, and the writer himself; Fink is occasionally a sympathetic character when he gets in over his head, but it's more important to the Coens that he's callow and deluded, so lost in his patronizing ideals that he actively dodges honest perspective. ("Boy, I could tell you some stories." "I bet you could.") his inability to write anything truly genuine, or in fact anything at all, forces the question of art's relationship to reality, and the pathetic folly of all the hacks gumming up the works on both sides.

still, it's got That Coen Brothers Feeling (in spades!), so there's ample comedy beneath the peeling wallpaper. ("Have you read the bible, Pete?" "The holy bible?") writerly pretension saturates the craft as much as it does the story, as the brothers Coen, born with tongues grafted to their respective cheeks, further scene by scene the symbological goofery they toyed with in Raising Arizona and Miller's Crossing, reaching a fever pitch in the final shot (an all time favorite.) and all the while it's a small cinematic marvel. it's little wonder the film was so well-received at Cannes, as it draws wittily on the European traditions (and merits the rarely-deserved adjective "Kafkaesque"), but it's also as solid a piece of Americana as exists in their filmography.