Miller's Crossing. - movie reviews

National Review, Dec 3, 1990 by John Simon

INFANTILIZATION of the American cinema proceeds apace, with Miller's Crossing a prime exhibit. Made by the two successful young filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen as their first truly big-budget film, this is a fine example of what rock-bottom film-school experience combined with high-level pretension can do when propped up with extensive, expensive hype.

Miller's Crossing is trumpery down to its very title, ostensibly the name of a spot in the woods outside an unnamed city in the Twenties where gang-style executions take place. Since the spot, as shown in the movie, has nothing to differentiate it from another part of the forest, there is no reason for its picturesque name or for its serving for anything more than family picnics. But the birches are tall and provide this tall tale's cinematographer, Barry Sonnenfeld, with many a moody low-angle shot from the point of view of some luckless hood catching his last sight of daylight through a latticework of leaves as he is marched off to his summary quietus.

It is in fact the camera work, backed up by production design and costuming, that wags the entire atmosphere-heavy and content-depleted picture. Sonnenfeld gives everything, indoors or out, a nicely burnished look, as if things and people were all made of weather-beaten leather and smoke-stained wood paneling, which are indeed the prime ingredients of crime overlords' offices and bars cum gambling dens, where the low-saturated colors complement insatiable greed. The time, when we are not in the darkling woods or under overcast city skies, is usually late, or the space windowless, so that chiaroscuro can supply the mystery and menace the writing and directing lack.

The story is simplistic: an Irish gang versus an Italian mob with a petty Jewish crook, Bennie, in the middle. Leo, the Irish crime boss, protects Bennie because he is carrying on with Bennie's sister, the tough, sexy Verna. But Bennie, a dishonest bookie, has fallen afoul of Johnny, the Italian gang leader, and Leo's refusal to hand him over starts a gang war. Matters are complicated by Verna's also being involved-and in love--with Tom, a romantically sodden and relentlessly brooding Irishman, Leo's chief advisor. Though he enjoys sex with Verna, Tom seems to care more about Leo, albeit in some twisted, tormented way, which appears to make him enjoy being beaten up by Leo when he confesses to being Verna's lover. But, then, Tom is always getting beaten up brutally, though he never has more than a slightly cut lip to show for it.

The total corruption of the mayor and chief of police; a homosexual triangle involving Johnny's vicious bodyguard, Eddie, the aforesaid Bennie, and Mink, the manager of Leo's gambling den; various raids by the police and rival gangs that are staged (inadvertently) like comic strips; Tom and Verna's love-making that bristles with hostility but has a soft core of mush; these and other strands are presented with a mixture of cinematheque derivativeness and sophomoric posturing, and hardly one believably conceived character.

Typical is a nocturnal attack on Leo in his lair by machine-gun-wielding goons, which Leo thwarts. Hiding under his bed and armed with a mere handgun, he is invulnerable; he wastes all those machine gunners, lowers himself from the window of his now-burning house, gives chase on foot to the remaining goons speeding away in a car and firing at him from its windows. He, too, has acquired an automatic weapon; though fully exposed, he remains unscathed as he causes the getaway car to be driven into a tree and explode. Then he sticks the lighted cigar he has been smoking in bed back in his mouth (where was it when he jumped from his window?) and puffs away in unison with his smoking gun.

The scene epitomizes the mindless gangster-worship, complete disjunction from reality, and bang-bang-you're-dead mentality of the Coen brothers, who co-script what Joel then directs and Ethan produces. Their previous efforts, Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, struck me as similarly gross and simple-minded, and I cherish the comment of The Village Voice's Gary Giddins that the Coens remind him of Professor Fleeber's students in The Freshman, a send-up of the New York University Film School. The Coens are indeed graduates of that institution, with their minds preserved in a sophomoric self-assurance more powerful than formaldehyde.

Albert Finney, a true actor, does whatever can be done for Leo, and even sounds convincingly American. Gabriel Byrne, as Tom, with a sticky-thick Irish brogue and eyes so close together William Tell couldn't shoot him between them, nurses his melancholy like a lush his closing-time drink. Marcia Gay Harden, a rather expressionless Verna, nevertheless has an unwashed, animalistic appeal; Jon Polito's comic-sinister Johnny, with his disquisitions on "etics" [sic], which seem to slay the Coens, oozes excess; J. E. Freeman is horror-film scary as Eddie. But John Turturro, though in danger of repeating himself, gives a genuinely chilling performance as Bernie; he finds the exact middle path between whining spinelessness and crazed bestiality. But the film is a hopeless cliche, even about who survives in the end and who doesn't.