...whether we're supposed to take it as a dark comedy or a straightforward melodrama is up to the viewer.... The Coens have always been a little twisted.
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I tend to think of "Miller's Crossing" as the Coen brothers' lost film. Many young people I talk to who love the Coens' films are only familiar with their most-recent work like "The Man Who Wasn't There," "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?," "The Big Lebowski," or "Fargo." But they seldom remember or even know much about the Coens' third film, their off-kilter 1990 gangster yarn. People forget that "Miller's Crossing" was the first film after "Blood Simple" and "Raising Arizona" to bring the Coens international critical attention. Perhaps because it's the darkest of the brothers' creations, it's the one most likely to be passed over. A shame, really, because it's one of their best movies.
Directed by Joel Coen, produced by Ethan Coen, and written by both Coens, the movie opens in what can be described as either a parody of or a homage to "The Godfather," with a close-up of a man seated in a dark-paneled room talking to a crime boss across a mahogany desk. He's not the undertaker looking to obtain justice for his daughter's rape, however; he's a mob underboss complaining that a bookie is chiseling him, and he wants the big boss's permission to rub him out. He ironically talks of "ethics" and says with a straight face, "If you can't trust a fix, what can you trust?"
The Coens told cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld (the same Sonnenfeld who has since gone on to glory of his own as a director) that they wanted "a handsome movie about men in hats." They wanted a masculine movie and they got one. But whether we're supposed to take it as a dark comedy or a straightforward melodrama is up to the viewer. A little of both, maybe. The Coens have always been a little twisted.
The movie's time frame is the Prohibition Era of the late 1920s or the early 30s, it's unclear, and the setting is a large city, possibly Chicago since it's run by an Irish gang headed by Liam "Leo" O'Bannon (Albert Finney). In real-life, Irish and Italian mobs contended for the Windy City before Capone finally prevailed. Leo is the big cheese, so big he's got the Mayor and the Chief of Police in his pocket. His counselor and most-trusted friend is Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne), a rummy addicted not only to booze but gambling, who sits at his side in all decisions. Tom owes a bookie big time, but he won't let his boss square it; he insists on paying his own debts.
All the same, trouble develops when Tom advises Leo to allow the aforementioned underboss, Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito), murder a weasel, Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro), who's cheating him. Seems it's an imprudent suggestion, though, because Leo is in love with Bernbaum's sister, a femme fatale named Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), and Verna has asked Leo to protect her brother. One other complication: While Leo is thinking of proposing to Verna, Tom is surreptitiously sleeping with her! It's the kind of situation that can break up a good friendship, and Leo is eventually faced with having to decide between his best friend and his best girl, while at the same time trying to deal with a gangland war that's erupting between himself and Caspar.
Basically, and regardless of its serpentine plot twists, the story is about one man, Tom Reagan, and the Coens never let you forget it. Tom is in virtually every scene, and this is his journey, a flight into hell, you might say, a quest to discover if he has a heart, or a trek to lose one. Byrne, with his smoldering good looks and dark, sometimes sinister mannerisms, makes an ideal subject for this modern Dante descent.
Although the movie toys with big themes like love and friendship, loyalty and honor, power and betrayal, it largely turns these traditional values upside down and leaves you, instead, with a series of quick but lasting impressions. Accordingly, rather than fretting the large-scale points, cherish the film's smaller moments.
Take in the beauty and serenity of the woods, for example, that are known as Miller's Crossing, a place where mobsters bring people they're about to execute and where they dispose of the bodies. The location becomes a crossroads in Tom's life as he returns to it twice literally and once more figuratively by the end of the picture.
Notice, too, the great faces the Coens capture, like the little boy staring at the body of a dead gangster in an alleyway and the kid touching the corpse's skewed hairpiece, which just happens to resemble the coat of a dog standing nearby. Wonderful stuff.
Observe the colorful cast of supporting players, so essential to the gangster genre: Not only Leo, Tom, Verna, Bernie, and Caspar, but the menacing Eddie Dane (J.E. Freeman), Caspar's right-hand man; and Frankie (Mike Starr) and Tic-Tac (Al Mancini), a pair of Caspar's dim-witted henchmen; and Mink (Steve Buscemi), a weak-kneed underling. Great character roles.
Mark the use of musical irony as every scene is underscored by contrasting tunes: "Good Night, Sweetheart" as Tom gets the crude beat out of him, or "Danny Boy" as Leo, still "an artist with a Thompson" submachine gun, blows away his enemies with alarming accuracy and calm. Yes, the film is violent, and the music makes it all the more brutal for its subtlety and grace.
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[release]10819[/release]