SHARP SHOOTERS

VOGUE - October 1990
By David DeNicolo

JOHN TURTURRO AND GABRIEL BYRNE SIDE-STEP THE TOMMY GUN FIRE AS MILLER’S CROSSING GOES WHERE NO GANGSTER DRAMA HAS GONE BEFORE. DAVID DeNICOLO EXPLAINS WHAT “THE RUMPUS” IS ALL ABOUT.

Three ice cubes drop into a glass, followed by a splash of scotch. The year is 1929. A dwarflike Mafioso is delivering a convoluted monologue on ethics, of all things, to the town’s Irish boss, Leo (Albert Finney), and Leo’s right-hand man, tom (Gabriel Byrne). Cut to a forest. The camera moves along the ground, looking straight up at the treetops and sky. Irish music plays, lyrical and sweet. Now the camera pans across the forest floor, which is covered in a rich, autumnal coat of leaves, yellow and brown. Suddenly a black fedora floats into the foreground of the frame and touches down briefly. The music takes a subtle, ominous turn, and in one long, ravishing shot, the hat flies off into the distance. In the following scene, Tom wakes up from a hard drunk and inquires, “What’s me hat?”

This is the opening sequence of Miller’s Crossing, one of the most inspired American films in years. The movie was made by the Coen brothers-Joel and Ethan-who write, produce, and direct their films. They seem to be waging a two-man campaign to bring auteurism to Hollywood, a place where the influences of stars, producers, and studio heads often combine to wring films dry of any originality, any purpose beyond the marketplace. This is only their third movie, after Blood Simple and Raising Arizona.

Miller’s Crossing gives an audience the feeling of watching something totally new, of seeing an old genre (the 30’s gangster movie) twisted and reinvented. The Coen brothers’ tools for accomplishing this are their slightly demented sense of humor, bold, sophisticated writing, and a rate technical elegance. The movie’s opening sequence serves as a microcosm of the whole film, which follows Tom’s labyrinthine attempts to extricate himself from the first scene’s world of corruption, violence, politics, greed, and ever-shifting loyalties. The forest-Miller’s Crossing-represents escape, either through redemption or death.

For the Coen brothers, Miller’s Crossing grew out of that haunting image of the hat in the forest. Several times in the film, Tom almost loses his hat, a metaphor for almost losing his head, his equilibrium, his life. Gabriel Byrne, a relatively unknown Irish-born actor, is the heart of this film peopled with entertaining but basically unlikable characters. He travels through the intricate plot like an existentialist hero, getting his face kicked in several times along the way. He is full of distrust, cunning, and the instinct to survive. His motto: “Nobody knows anybody. Not that well.” By the end of the film we share Tom’s acceptance that he is all alone and that hell is indeed other people.

Tom’s nemesis Bernie (John Turturro), an oily opportunist who becomes the catalyst for the bloody gang war that has Tom trapped in the middle. To complicate matters, Bernie is the inexplicably beloved brother of Tom’s sometime girlfriend, Verna (played with tough-as-nails abandon by newcomer Marcia Gay Harden).

According to Byrne, holding the center of Miller’s Crossing was a formidable task: “It was tough because they all believe what they do is right-Leo, Verna, even Bernie. They’re all deluded, but they’re sincere. Immortal and amoral. At one point, Verna says to Tom, ‘You’ve got a heart of stone’ But he has to have one, to survive. He can’t keep his head in the clouds. I hope I pulled it off.”

Turturro, for whom the Coens wrote the part of Bernie as well as the head role of their next film, has an unusual relationship to his character. “I often feel I don’t belong in the present period,” he says, “I feel more like I belong in the film’s era. They didn’t just write an ‘intense, urban John Turturro role’ for me. Bernie’s not a grinning evil guy, because that’s too easy. Joel and Ethan take what they do too seriously to just make him a villain.” If Byrne is the heart of the film, then Turturro is the brain-and a cruel, demented brain it is.

What immediately distinguishes Miller’s Crossing from the 30’s gangster film and all its contemporary permutations (like the police drama) is the Coens’ distinct language, which borrows heavily from the tough, laconic works of writers such as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Theirs was a pessimistic universe full of boldly drawn characters and straightforward sexuality, always darkened by the shadow of brutality. “The flavor of the dialogue draws more from pulp fiction than from the movies of the 30’s,” says Ethan Coen, “and that kind of speech isn’t used much in movies at all. That’s part of what’s fun about it. The dialogue is a combination of real stuff, from those books, and made-up stuff. Like the lien ‘What’s the rumpus?’ that Gabriel says all the time. It really wasn’t used as a greeting as a synonym for “What’s going on?’ as it is in the movie. It just seemed to sound right.”

The layering of antisentimental language over an essentially melodramatic genre, and the tension it creates, is one important source of the film’s energy and humor-particularly in the hands of Turturro, who wrings a special lunacy from lines like “She’s a sick twist, all right,” which describes his doting sister, Verna.

In another similarity to pulp fiction, Miller’s Crossing is plotted within an inch of its life, and the Coens put up no signposts along the way-they just zip along through the twists and double crosses. Turturro admits, “I had to read it at least three times before I understood it.”

“I guess Miller’s Crossing does require a difference in concentration from the audience,” says Ethan Coen, “because the plot is a little Byzantine. You could get lost in the movie if you’re not paying attention.”

“Or even if you are paying attention,” says Joel Coen, whose interjection sets the brothers laughing at what seems, in part, a private joke.

One of the story’s most surprising elements in the way it includes homosexuality without making an issue of it. The two homosexual villains are villains who happen to be homosexual, not villains because they are homosexual. Their sexuality is not what makes them evil. Thus Miller’s Crossing reverses a long homophobic Hollywood tradition that found its most insidious practitioner in Hitchcock, who stoked irrational fears of gays in films as Psycho, Strangers on a Train, and Rope.

But what really makes Miller’s Crossing a great film is the Coens’ visual inventiveness. The film looks lavish, though it was made on relatively little movie. It is full of startling, zoom-approach close-ups and cool, lingering reaction shots, mostly of Byrne, whose dour calm belies his character’s desperation. The camera placement is frequently odd or ironic. The audience often finds itself looking straight into an oncoming fist or boot, or down the barrel of a gun. There is an exciting feeling of movement and participation throughout the movie.

Perhaps the most vivid example of the Coens’ skill with the camera is the bravura tommy-gun shoot-out between Finney’s Leo and two would-be assassins. The sequence is relatively brief but would take several pages of this magazine to describe in detail. In it, the Coen brothers play with timing-the cornerstone of any exciting shoot-out. It seems to take Finney forever to realize that there are intruders in his house, to stub out his cigar, and to put on his black velvet slippers. (This may have something to do with the fact that “Danny Boy” is blaring insanely from his Victrola.) A few moments later, Finney-whose bold, athletic performance makes tangible the many comparisons to Olivier-slays one of his attackers by shooting him through a window. He doesn’t just shoot him, though; he riddles his body with hundreds of bullets. The victim’s body twitches grotesquely in a shot that is held for a ridiculously long time. The image puts one in mind of a line from Ethan Coen’s short story “A Fever in the Blood”: “He danced and crumpled like a marionette whose puppeteer has a stroke.”

This is one of the Coens’ visual signatures-taking the gruesome and rendering it absurd. But their sense of the absurd has never been so keen as it is here. Much of Miller’s Crossing rests just on the edge of parody. At the end of the shoot-out, after making mincemeat of his enemies, Finney coolly takes the stubbed cigar from the pocket of his silk robe and places it I his mouth-the coup de grace.

Joe and Ethan Coen, now at work in Los Angeles on their next film, Barton Fink, have a lot to be happy about. Miller’s Crossing was chosen as the opening film of the New York Film Festival. But they still have a few qualms.

“It wasn’t our title,” says Ethan, “but we couldn’t come up with anything better.”

“It seemed to us sort of an…adequate title for a gangster movie,” says Joe.

“The title doesn’t exactly grab you by the lapels and shake you.”

The movie, however, does just that.