Miller's Crossing (1990, Joel Coen) (Patreon)

Apologies for the comparative paucity of reviews this week. I was too preoccupied with the election to concentrate on movies, and wound up watching only the two that I absolutely needed to for professional assignments with immediate deadlines, plus Knud Rasmussen which as I noted was a mistake. Now that sanity has potentially been restored, things around here should quickly return to normal. Thanks for understanding. Love you all. 

90/100

At least third viewing (more likely fourth), last seen 2003. Struck this time by how frequently Tom Reagan says "I'll think about it"—this is a film about the war between rationality and irrationality, as silently waged in one preternaturally cagey man's soul. "The two of us have faced worse odds," Leo insists, early on, when he's trying to justify taking on Caspar. "Never without reason," replies Tom. "It helps to have one." By their final scene together, though, he's striking the opposite tone, rhetorically asking "Do you always know why you do things, Leo?" Much of the film's power—and this is what escaped me in 1990, when I considered it a (very) mild disappointment relative to Blood Simple and Raising Arizona—lies in how murky Tom's motivations remain throughout, possibly even to himself. Certainly I don't think it crossed my mind, 30 years ago, that he might be in love with Leo, though I now find it hard to interpret his yearning gaze in the final shot any other way. (Side note: While plenty of realistic-for-the-era anti-Semitism gets tossed around, these characters are downright progressive in their casual acceptance of gay relationships. Nobody bats an eye, much less hurls an epithet.) The hat remains a hat, we're told, and no possible interpretation of its symbolic significance could improve upon the uncanny beauty of watching it gently land in exactly the right spot before being blown into the distance (without ever deviating from roughly the center of the frame; I frankly have no clue how they pulled that off from start to finish, apart from shooting it over and over until they finally got a magical take). Barton Fink is obviously far more surreal, but both films share that rare, treasurable quality (see also: Lynch, David) of remaining just shy of total comprehension while somehow feeling completely lucid. This one just places such mysteries alongside more basic psychological complexity, e.g. ultra-pragmatic (?) Tom placing another sure-to-lose bet immediately after finally squaring himself with Lazarre—a marvelous touch that had barely registered for me previously. 

Still, I kinda want to go back in time and slap my younger self around, because Miller's Crossing works magnificently even if you're oblivious to all of the above. (To be clear, I did like the film initially. Probably would've been like a 68 or something. But that seems too low given all of its surface pleasures.) With one exception that I'll address below, the narrative unfolds with spiky elegance, at once dialogue-driven—there are too many choice lines for me to start quoting any; I'd be here all day—and predicated on the strategic withholding of key visual information, e.g. Bernie sitting in Tom's chair (the first time) such that no part of him is visible from behind, though that seems at a glance as if it would be impossible. (I of course knew he was there and still had trouble imagining his physical position.) That last moment also relies upon Tom not reacting in any way to Bernie's presence, and Byrne's performance here is just a paradoxical marvel of closed-off raw emotion, impassive yet inflamed. (It's The Man Who Pretended He Wasn't There. Though I guess I consider that equally true of Ed Crane.) This might be Turturro's finest work, and I'm not sure that it isn't Finney's as well; J.E. Freeman never made an impression on me in any other role, but he lands the Dane so hard that it doesn't matter. I'll confess that I think Polito pushes a little too far into outright caricature (for which I'd ultimately blame Joel and Ethan, not him), and could live without the ostensible comedy involving Caspar's son, as well as this incarnation of the Coens' love for bellowing fat men. (Drop Johnson seems to have wandered in from Raising Arizona.) And of course this is a universe with essentially one (1) woman, who's defined almost exclusively by whom she sleeps with and why. (Harden makes it mostly work via sheer truculence.) But those are all the quibbles I can muster. Everything else goes down smooth.

No, wait, I forgot to note the aforementioned exception to what's otherwise one of the most satisfying gangster plots in cinema. I'm inclined to be forgiving, because the tiny "cheat" that I perceive facilitates some truly fantastic scenes—the return to Miller's Crossing in particular. Wouldn't want to lose that. (Tom vomiting, it occurs to me, is another indication of how few glimpses we're allowed into his psyche. Not something one expects given his demeanor up to then.) However. I just do not believe that Caspar's goons would have left without seeing Bernie's body. That defies reason, given that the whole point of having Tom pull the trigger is to test his loyalty. The Coens do their best to justify this by having the Dane call them idiots, but nobody's that dumb. They'd have confirmed it, not just trusted the sound of far-off gunshots...and furthermore, there's no reason why Tom wouldn't have expected them to confirm it (in which case sparing Bernie is suicidal). Again, not a dealbreaker or anything, but it always nags at me when a story pivots on something so implausible. Especially in a context like this, with its deliberate chasm between thought and action, cogitation and impulse. With the known unknown.