No Country is impeccable: the cinematography is breathtaking, the dialogue efficient, and the direction assured. Chance and destiny are invoked in the most resonant, least pretentious way in the sinister form of Anton Chigurh (Best Supporting Actor Javier Bardem), the hit man who coldly and relentlessly hunts Brolin’s Llewelyn.
In No Country, based on the stoic anti-western novel by Cormack McCarthy, Josh Brolin’s protagonist sees a way out of his trailer in a bag of bloodied bills. It’s perhaps logical, then, that the massive Academy sweep they enjoyed with No Country for Old Men seemed like overdue praise. Though the Coens have long been revered for their intermittently manic and macabre storylines, they’ve never made Oscar bait.
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Describing it as “gnomic, claustrophobic, hallucinatory, just plain weird,” Time’s Richard Schickel lauded Barton Fink as “the kind of movie critics can soak up thousands of words analyzing and cinephiles can soak up at least three espressos arguing their way through.” But as every smart filmmaker is wont to do, the Coens offer no overt explanations of what’s really going on - just a well-told tale with visual imagery aplenty, and an ode to the sometimes infernal nature of the creative process. The mercury rises further when Barton’s gregarious neighbor (John Goodman) is around almost hellishly so, you might say.
A fledgling New York playwright who sells out (at the cost of… his soul!) and moves to the City of Angels, Barton Fink (played marvelously by Coen regular John Turturro) holes up in the seamy Hotel Earle, where exquisitely dismal wallpaper peels off the walls as a heat wave sweats the city. Legend has it the Coens had such a bad case of writers’ block while writing Miller’s Crossing that they took three weeks off to script Barton Fink, a 1930s-set black comedy about - what else? - a Hollywood scribe with writer’s block.