9 / 10
Official trailer
A Film About Writer’s Block
Barton Fink is a film about writer’s block, and it’s the most unsettling one ever made. It begins as a satire of Hollywood and pretentious intellectuals, becomes a strange, claustrophobic study of a man alone in a hotel room, and ends as something close to a horror film, with fire, murder and a box whose contents are never revealed. It’s funny, frightening and deeply strange, and it gets under your skin.
Joel and Ethan Coen wrote it in about three weeks, reportedly while stuck on the script for Miller’s Crossing, and it came out in 1991. At Cannes, it won the Palme d’Or, the best director prize and the best actor prize for John Turturro, the first film ever to win all three, and the festival later changed its rules to prevent it happening again. It flopped at the box office. I give it a 9.
I adore this film. It’s the only movie about writer’s block that makes me feel the heat of that hotel room and the dread of that one typed line, and whenever Barton stares at the page I recognize myself more than I’d like. The Coens made something funny, nasty and frightening out of the dullest activity on earth, a man sitting at a desk failing to work, and I think nobody else has pulled that off.
Barton
John Turturro plays Barton Fink, a New York playwright who has just had a hit on Broadway with a serious play about the common man. It’s 1941, and Hollywood comes calling. Capitol Pictures offers him a large salary to write films, and Barton, who claims he wants to create a new theatre of and for the working man, takes the money and goes west.
Turturro is brilliant. Barton is earnest, pompous, anxious and completely lacking in self-awareness. He talks constantly about the life of the mind and the dignity of ordinary people, and he never listens to any ordinary person who talks to him. He’s modeled loosely on the playwright Clifford Odets, and the film is merciless about his vanity.
It’s also sympathetic. Barton is talented, lost and in over his head, and his anxiety about writing is painfully real to anyone who has ever stared at a blank page. The scenes of him sitting at the typewriter, rereading one line, listening to the noises through the wall, are uncomfortably accurate.
The Hotel Earle
Barton checks into the Hotel Earle, a faded, decaying residential hotel with endless empty corridors, a bell that rings and rings, and a strange, eager bellboy named Chet, played by Steve Buscemi, who rises up from beneath the front desk.
His room is hot, humid and oppressive. The wallpaper peels off the walls and drips glue. A mosquito buzzes in the night.
The hotel is the film’s most brilliant creation.
It feels alive, sweating and oozing, as if it’s slowly digesting its guests. The long corridors, shot with slow, creeping camera movements, stretch into darkness, and the rows of shoes left outside the doors suggest guests who never seem to appear. It’s the physical form of Barton’s writer’s block: hot, stuck and slowly rotting.
On the wall of his room is a small picture of a woman on a beach, shading her eyes and looking out to sea. Barton stares at it constantly, and it becomes the film’s central image, a glimpse of escape he can’t reach. It’s also a picture of everything the hotel isn’t: cool, open, bright and free.
The Earle is a big reason I’d rate this so high. I can almost smell that room. The peeling wallpaper and the glue oozing down it explain Barton’s block better than any line of dialogue could, and I’d happily watch a whole film of Buscemi’s Chet rising up from behind that desk.
For Writers
The Hotel Earle sweats, peels and oozes. The setting is the physical form of Barton’s blocked, rotting creativity, and it tells the audience how he feels without a word.
When you write a setting, making it reflect your character’s inner state can create mood and meaning more powerfully than any description of their feelings. Describe your character’s surroundings through details that mirror what they’re going through. Let a stuck character live somewhere stuck, and a decaying one somewhere decaying. For more, see my article on settings that do real work.
The Wrestling Picture
Barton’s assignment is a wrestling picture starring Wallace Beery. It’s the kind of film Hollywood churned out by the dozen, and Barton, who thinks of himself as an artist, has no idea how to write it. He sits at his typewriter and produces a single opening line, and then nothing.
The studio boss, Jack Lipnick, played by Michael Lerner, is a loud, flattering, terrifying tycoon who declares that the writer is king and then tells Barton he wants a picture with that Barton Fink feeling. Lerner was nominated for an Oscar, and his scenes are among the funniest in the film, especially when Lipnick grovels at Barton’s feet in a grotesque show of respect, then turns on him.
The film is a savage satire of Hollywood’s treatment of writers, full of producers who want art and formula at the same time and don’t know the difference. The Coens know this world from the inside, and their contempt for it is gleeful. Tony Shalhoub has a sharp small role as a producer who explains, wearily, how pictures really get made.
Lerner’s Lipnick is my favorite thing in the picture after the hotel. A studio boss groveling at a writer’s feet and then gutting him a scene later is the kind of comedy I wish Hollywood made about itself more often, and as a writer I laughed hardest at the parts that hurt.
Charlie
Barton’s neighbor at the Hotel Earle is Charlie Meadows, an insurance salesman, played by John Goodman.
Charlie is big, friendly, loud and lonely, and he keeps knocking on Barton’s door to chat. He tells Barton he could tell him some stories. Barton, who talks endlessly about the common man, keeps interrupting him to talk about himself.
Goodman is superb. Charlie is warm, funny and sad, a salesman who spends his life on the road and has nobody to talk to, and Barton, who claims to care about people like him, never really sees him. Their friendship is the heart of the film’s first half, and it’s a pointed joke: the man who wants to write about ordinary people can’t listen to the ordinary man sitting on his bed.
And Charlie isn’t what he seems. The film’s turn, when it comes, reveals something about Charlie that transforms the whole story, and Goodman’s performance, so gentle until then, takes on a terrifying new meaning. Looking back, every friendly chat and every offered story reads differently. That’s the mark of a well-planted turn.
I think Goodman gives the best performance in the film, and I’d say so even with Turturro this good. The warmth is so complete that the turn feels like a betrayal of the audience as much as of Barton, and it’s the moment the film grabbed me by the collar.
For Writers
Barton talks endlessly about the common man, and he never listens to Charlie. The film’s central irony is a writer who can’t hear the voice he claims to serve.
For a character with a stated ideal, the most revealing scenes show them failing to live up to it in small, everyday ways. Give your character a principle they talk about often, and write a scene where they betray it without noticing. Let the reader see the gap they can’t.
Mayhew and Audrey
Desperate, Barton seeks help from W.P. Mayhew, a great Southern novelist now working as a screenwriter, played by John Mahoney as an obvious version of William Faulkner. Mayhew is a drunk, bitter and abusive, and Barton idolizes him until he discovers that Mayhew’s secretary and lover, Audrey, played by Judy Davis, has been writing much of his work.
Barton asks Audrey to help him with his script, and she comes to his room one night. What happens next is where the film turns, and it plunges Barton into a nightmare. The film never shows it directly, and the shock of discovery is among the most frightening moments in any Coen film.
Barton, terrified, turns to the only person he knows, Charlie, and Charlie deals with the problem with a calm, practical efficiency that should have been a warning. From this point, the film abandons its satirical comedy and becomes something darker, and it never goes back.
The Life of the Mind
The final act is a fever dream. Detectives come to the hotel asking about Charlie. Barton, suddenly inspired, writes his screenplay in a single burst and believes it’s the best thing he’s ever done. Charlie returns, the hotel catches fire, and Charlie walks down the burning corridor with a shotgun, shouting that he’ll show Barton the life of the mind.
Few sequences in any film are this strange, and it’s open to many interpretations. Some see Charlie as the embodiment of Barton’s suppressed violence and inspiration, some as a symbol of the ordinary people Barton ignored, some as the devil and the hotel as hell. The film is set in 1941, weeks before Pearl Harbor, and it has also been read as a story about the coming war and the violence beneath American life.
The Coens have refused to explain it, and it doesn’t need explaining. It works on its own terms, as a nightmare made of heat, fire and guilt. Every image in it, the burning wallpaper, the screaming man, the detectives in the corridor, feels like something from a dream you can’t wake up from.
This is the stretch that keeps the film from a 10, and it’s also the stretch I’d fight hardest to keep. Charlie in that burning hallway with a shotgun is thrilling and baffling at once. I don’t need it explained, but I understand anyone who walks out feeling cheated.
The Box
Before he leaves, Charlie gives Barton a box to look after.
Barton carries it for the rest of the film, never opens it, and the audience never learns what’s inside. It’s about the size of a human head, and the film invites us to fear the worst. Barton puts it on his desk as he writes, and it sits there like a question he’s afraid to answer.
It’s the Coens’ most famous unanswered question, and it’s the perfect symbol for a film about creation: something unknown, heavy and possibly terrible that the writer carries around without daring to look at. Like the hat in Miller’s Crossing, it’s never explained, and its power comes from its mystery. Audiences have argued about it for more than thirty years, and the argument is part of the film.
By the end, Barton is carrying the box everywhere, as if it has become part of him. Whatever it contains, it’s his now, and he’ll never be free of it. It’s hard to think of a better image for what writing costs the writer.
For Writers
Charlie’s box is never opened. The film’s most powerful object is powerful because the audience never learns what’s inside.
With a mystery object, revealing its contents can reduce it to a single meaning. Keeping it closed lets it carry every meaning the reader imagines.
Introduce an object your character carries but never examines, and resist the urge to explain it. Let the reader’s imagination fill it with meaning.
The Beach
The film ends with Barton, his screenplay rejected by Lipnick, who tells him he will stay under contract and never have anything produced, sitting on a beach with the box. A woman walks past and sits down, exactly like the woman in the picture on his hotel wall, and shades her eyes and looks out to sea. A seagull dives into the water.
It’s a dreamlike, ambiguous ending. It’s strangely peaceful after the fire and horror.
Barton has found the image he stared at, but it doesn’t mean what he thought. He’s trapped, and he’s in the picture, and whether that’s liberation or damnation is left for the audience to decide. It’s the kind of ending that stays in your mind for days, rearranging everything that came before.
What Barton Fink Gets Right
It’s a wholly original film about creativity, full of images and performances I can’t shake. It’s frightening and funny at the same time. Turturro and Goodman are excellent, the hotel is a triumph of design, and the ending haunts me.
It isn’t a 10 because its final act is so strange and open that some viewers will find it frustrating, and its satire of intellectual vanity can feel cold.
It’s still one of the Coens’ finest films. It’s essential viewing for anyone who has ever tried to write. Any writer will recognize Barton’s paralysis, and more than a little of his vanity.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Barton Fink turns writer’s block into a physical place and a physical threat. The hotel, the heat, the neighbor and the box all make the invisible struggle of creation visible and frightening.
In a story about an inner struggle, the temptation is to describe thoughts and feelings. Giving the struggle a physical shape makes it dramatic. Find a physical setting, object or character that embodies your protagonist’s inner conflict, and let the plot develop through them instead of through reflection.
The Verdict on Barton Fink
Yes. It’s a 9, and it’s the film about writing I’d put in front of any writer I know. It keeps its 10 out of reach with an ending so open it can feel like a dare, and a satire of vanity that can run cold, but I’ll take strange and cold from the Coens over tidy from almost anybody. Watch it if you’ve ever stared at a blank page, and be ready for the fire.
