Product Description

Set in Hollywood during the 1940's, "Barton Fink" is a comic satire about creative egos, flashy moguls, a travelling salesman and a nasty case of writer's block. Barton Fink (John Turturro) is a New York playwright lured to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter. It doesn't take long for Barton's life to erupt in complete chaos. His studio boss orders the serious-minded Barton to write a low budget wrestling movie. Deeply disappointed, Barton returns to his seedy hotel, types one sentence and then¿ nothing. To make matters worse, he is continually interrupted by Charlie (John Goodman), a chatty travelling insurance salesman who lives next door. Eventually they become friends and Charlie tries to help Barton by teaching him the finer points of wrestling. As the clock ticks away and the temperature climbs, Barton becomes more desperate as his life spins out of control.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13788 in DVD
• Brand: TURTURRO,JOHN
• Released on: 2003-05-20
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, Spanish
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Dubbed in: French
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .26 pounds
• Running time: 116 minutes

Amazon.com
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

From The New Yorker
The Coen brothers' macabre comedy about a blocked writer in 1941 Hollywood is densely packed with allusions, clever dialogue, ingenious visual jokes, startling plot twists, and imaginative atmospheric effects, yet it feels thin. It's an empty tour de force, and what's dismaying about the picture is that the filmmakers (Joel Coen directed, Ethan Coen produced, and they wrote the script together) seem inordinately pleased with its hermetic meaninglessness. Fink (John Turturro), the protagonist, is a left-wing New York playwright-obviously based on Clifford Odets-who signs a contract to write screenplays in Hollywood. His first assignment is a wrestling picture for Wallace Beery. He can't get started on it: he sits in his seedy, depressing hotel room, stares at the typewriter, and feels defeated. The Coens treat this emblematic figure of thirties culture with merciless contempt. They quickly expose him as a phony, a buffoon, and a talentless hack, and then spend the rest of the movie punishing him. The picture is designed to visit even more grotesque indignities on a character who's pitiful from the outset; there's not much fun in that. And there's no fun at all in Turturro's hyperactive performance. He gapes and blinks and stammers and contorts his body into ungainly poses, and his mouth never seems to close: the way he plays this leftist intellectual, the movie might as well have been called "The Nutty Pinko." The Coens' interests are purely academic, and their prankish formalism becomes very irritating in the course of the picture. There's nothing at stake in the filmmakers' systematic dismantling of their hero and all he stands for-except, perhaps, their desire to demonstrate their superiority to the ethics and aesthetics of an earlier time. The Coens appear to be taking their lack of seriousness seriously: they're nihilist showoffs. Also with John Goodman, Michael Lerner, John Mahoney, Judy Davis, and Tony Shalhoub. The movie won awards for best picture, best director, and best actor (Turturro) at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker