Barton Fink Review: A Decaying Hotel Swallows a Writer Whole

Barton Fink is a strange, uneasy film about a writer losing his mind in a cheap Hollywood hotel. It wants to be a horror movie, a drama about creative failure, and a satire of Hollywood itself, all at once. It mostly succeeds, even when the pieces don’t quite fit together.

John Turturro plays Barton Fink, a Broadway playwright hired to write for Capitol Pictures in 1941. He moves to Los Angeles and checks into the Hotel Earle, a run-down place where the wallpaper peels and the air stays hot and damp. His neighbor, Charlie Meadows, played by John Goodman, is an insurance salesman whose apartment fills with noise and who eventually becomes Fink’s unlikely protector.

Trailer, via Klokline Cinema.

The Hotel Earle

The hotel is the film’s real star. The Coen brothers designed it as a decaying art-deco ruin, with green and yellow tones meant to suggest rot. Joel Coen told a 1991 interviewer that the hotel was meant to look like a ghost ship, peopled by failed commercial travelers crying alone in their rooms. The wallpaper peels like sweat running down Charlie’s forehead, and the whole place feels like hell before anyone speaks a line.

The Writing Contract

Fink’s job is simple: write a wrestling picture for a thousand dollars a week. He can’t do it. The film spends its middle stretch showing him staring at a blank page, phone calls to a producer named Ben Geisler, and a chance meeting with a novelist named W.P. Mayhew. Nothing helps. The film is about the terror of being asked to create and failing to deliver.

The Murder

Then Audrey Taylor, Mayhew’s secretary, shows up at the hotel. She’s played by Judy Davis, and she’s a real person, not a ghost. They sleep together, and the next morning she’s dead, murdered in the room. Fink calls Charlie, who hides the body and tells Fink to keep quiet. The murder is the film’s engine, but the film doesn’t spend much time on it. It’s a trigger, not a mystery.

Themes and Influence

The film is full of ideas. It’s about the writing process, about the difference between high culture and low culture, and about intellectuals and the common man. It draws on Roman Polanski’s Repulsion and The Tenant, films about women trapped in their own minds. It’s also a Künstlerroman, a story about a creator’s fall, and a postmodern horror film that refuses to settle into one category.

The Coens wrote the script in three weeks while struggling with writer’s block on Miller’s Crossing. They shot it soon after Miller’s Crossing wrapped. The film premiered at Cannes in May 1991, where it won the Palme d’Or, Best Director, and Best Actor for Turturro. It underperformed at the box office, earning $6 million against a $9 million budget, but it was nominated for three Academy Awards.

What Works

1. The hotel itself, which sets the tone from the first frame.
2. Turturro’s performance, nervous and trapped.
3. Goodman’s slow descent into madness.
4. The film’s refusal to explain the murder.

What Falls Short

The film’s ambition outstrips its patience. Some scenes run too long, and the film’s three main threads — the wrestling picture, the murder, and the hotel’s decay — don’t always meet. The ending is abrupt, and the film leaves the audience wanting more closure than it offers.

Barton Fink is a minor masterpiece with a major flaw: it’s too dense for its own good. The Coens packed too much into 117 minutes, and some of it falls flat. But the hotel, the wallpaper, and the fear of failure remain unforgettable. It’s a film best watched once, not returned to often.

6.9 of 10.

Barton Fink · Coen brothers · film review · horror · John Goodman · John Turturro