Amazon.com Essentials:
A darkly comic ride, this intense and original 1991 offering from the
Coen
brothers (Fargo, Blood Simple) gleefully attacks the
Hollywood system and those who seek to sell out to it, portraying the
writer's suffering as a loony vision of hell. John Turturro (Miller's
Crossing, Jungle Fever) plays the title character, a pretentious
left-wing writer from New York City who is brought to 1930s Hollywood to
write a script for a wrestling movie for palooka actor Wallace Beery. Fink
thinks the job is beneath him, but his desire for acceptance gets the
better of him, and he suddenly finds himself holed up in a fleabag hotel in
Los Angeles, where he is almost immediately afflicted with writer's block.
Various distractions begin to enter his life, first in the form of a famous
southern writer (John Mahoney) whom Fink idolizes, and then his neighbor in
the hotel, a seemingly amiable salesman played by John Goodman (Sea of
Love, Raising Arizona). The writer turns out to be a
self-loathing drunk whose secretary (Judy Davis) is the one actually doing
the writing. And the neighbor, the working-class hero who Fink made his
reputation writing about, may have a horrifying secret of his own. Equal
parts social commentary and hilarious farce, and winner of the Best
Picture, Actor, and Director prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, Barton
Fink is a visionary and original comic masterpiece not to be missed.
--Robert Lane
