"So it's clear what I'm saying?" The Italian gangster jaws at the
screen, the camera jammed right up into his jowly face. Returning the
man's imploring hostility with steely boredom from the other side of the
polished desk (the whole room a gleaming imitation of some robber
baron's den of power), the Irish gangster grumbles back, "As ... mud."
From that point on in the Coen brothers' headache-inducing
comic-gangster farrago, it's easy to get lost, but that's no matter. The
only trail of bread crumbs one needs to follow leads back to the one
character who matters: the man standing behind his Irish gangster boss:
Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne), the smartest man in whatever the hell city
this is supposed to be.
When Miller's Crossing came out in 1990, the Coens had already knocked off a couple radically different gems. 1984's Blood Simple was a crackerjack indie noir with a black streak of humor that summed up everything going right with American indie filmmaking in that time. Coming three years later, Raising Arizona blew its respectable budget on explosions and hyper-indulgent tracking shots to string together a preposterously druggy Looney Tunes comedy about a kidnapped baby, a lone biker of the apocalypse, and the rubbery extremes Nicolas Cage's face could be twisted into. They were both larks in a sense, and great in their way.
Miller's Crossing was a lark as well, shot through as it is with riffs on The Godfather and a plot that some argue was stolen lock, stock, and barrel from Dashiell Hammett's novel, The Glass Key. In its story of conflicted loyalties during an Irish-Italian Prohibition-era gang war, there were plenty of examples that the Coens weren't taking it any more seriously than their previous films. There was their buddy, director Sam Raimi, popping up as a slack-faced gangster who laughingly guns an unarmed man down in the street only to be himself swiss-cheesed by a barrage of bullets. You have Albert Finney, as Tom's none-too-bright boss Leo who pursues war with the "Eye-ties" in order to save the sleazy brother of his moll (who Tom is secretly sleeping with), fending off his rivals with a Tommy gun and a cigar while "Danny Boy" soars on the gramophone. That ostentatiously displayed hat of Tom's, which is hard to imagine that the Coens didn't toss in just to tweak symbology-prone critics. Not to mention Barry Sonnenfeld's shiny funhouse distortion cinematography that, with the just-too-perfect art direction, turns everything into a kind of dream. It's joke-heavy and bullet-riddled and studded with some of the most crackling dialogue heard since The Front Page. Everyone involved comes loaded to bear, and delivers.
But there's something in Tom's dilemma here that takes this film beyond its farcical elements. With his steel-trap mind and a quip-firing mouth, he's the sharpest thinker in any room here, but that doesn't save him from making bad bets at the card table or in his choice of sleeping companions. It also doesn't save him from first pretending to betray Leo to the Italians in order to play a gnarled and impossible-to-divine game of bluffs within bluffs only and then nearly tossing it all away by saving the life of the bottom-feeding hood who started the whole thing.
Byrne plays the role as though his life depended on it. He veers Tom first from amused cynicism ("All in all not a bad guy ... if looks, brains and personality don't count") to cynical amusement, delivering the Coens' artfully arcane prose with a morbid wit. But as the bodies mount up and his options begin to narrow, you begin to see the chill creep into Tom's words and the jokes dry into graveyard dust. The crippling despair that lies behind Byrne's sad, too-knowing eyes near the conclusion is the stuff that the most harrowing tragedies are made of.
The film begins in knowing satire and a winking brand of precise mimicry but ends in a haunting existential trap. Some may prefer the former, and a few the latter, but the brave admixture of the two makes for one of the soaring, inexplicable peaks of modern American filmmaking.
When Miller's Crossing came out in 1990, the Coens had already knocked off a couple radically different gems. 1984's Blood Simple was a crackerjack indie noir with a black streak of humor that summed up everything going right with American indie filmmaking in that time. Coming three years later, Raising Arizona blew its respectable budget on explosions and hyper-indulgent tracking shots to string together a preposterously druggy Looney Tunes comedy about a kidnapped baby, a lone biker of the apocalypse, and the rubbery extremes Nicolas Cage's face could be twisted into. They were both larks in a sense, and great in their way.
Miller's Crossing was a lark as well, shot through as it is with riffs on The Godfather and a plot that some argue was stolen lock, stock, and barrel from Dashiell Hammett's novel, The Glass Key. In its story of conflicted loyalties during an Irish-Italian Prohibition-era gang war, there were plenty of examples that the Coens weren't taking it any more seriously than their previous films. There was their buddy, director Sam Raimi, popping up as a slack-faced gangster who laughingly guns an unarmed man down in the street only to be himself swiss-cheesed by a barrage of bullets. You have Albert Finney, as Tom's none-too-bright boss Leo who pursues war with the "Eye-ties" in order to save the sleazy brother of his moll (who Tom is secretly sleeping with), fending off his rivals with a Tommy gun and a cigar while "Danny Boy" soars on the gramophone. That ostentatiously displayed hat of Tom's, which is hard to imagine that the Coens didn't toss in just to tweak symbology-prone critics. Not to mention Barry Sonnenfeld's shiny funhouse distortion cinematography that, with the just-too-perfect art direction, turns everything into a kind of dream. It's joke-heavy and bullet-riddled and studded with some of the most crackling dialogue heard since The Front Page. Everyone involved comes loaded to bear, and delivers.
But there's something in Tom's dilemma here that takes this film beyond its farcical elements. With his steel-trap mind and a quip-firing mouth, he's the sharpest thinker in any room here, but that doesn't save him from making bad bets at the card table or in his choice of sleeping companions. It also doesn't save him from first pretending to betray Leo to the Italians in order to play a gnarled and impossible-to-divine game of bluffs within bluffs only and then nearly tossing it all away by saving the life of the bottom-feeding hood who started the whole thing.
Byrne plays the role as though his life depended on it. He veers Tom first from amused cynicism ("All in all not a bad guy ... if looks, brains and personality don't count") to cynical amusement, delivering the Coens' artfully arcane prose with a morbid wit. But as the bodies mount up and his options begin to narrow, you begin to see the chill creep into Tom's words and the jokes dry into graveyard dust. The crippling despair that lies behind Byrne's sad, too-knowing eyes near the conclusion is the stuff that the most harrowing tragedies are made of.
The film begins in knowing satire and a winking brand of precise mimicry but ends in a haunting existential trap. Some may prefer the former, and a few the latter, but the brave admixture of the two makes for one of the soaring, inexplicable peaks of modern American filmmaking.
