MILLER'S CROSSING
A film review by Jon Cohen
Copyright 1990 Jon Cohen
I thoroughly enjoyed MILLER'S CROSSING, a powerful, original, and sometimes very funny gangster picture written, directed, and produced by Joel and Ethan Coen, the same team that created BLOOD SIMPLE and RAISING ARIZONA.
The story is about rival gangs--Irish, Italian, and Jewish--and their struggles to control the rackets, cops and politicians in a nameless American city that might be Boston in the 1920s or early 1930s. One of the impressive achievements of this film, I think, is how the Coen brothers create a generic city of darkness and lawlessness that refers as much to the history of gangster films as any real time and place.
These guys make movies with great style--lots of surprises, lots of rolling cameras following characters around, moving in slowly on people or chasing after them, constantly changing the audience's point of view. No doubt, Alfred Hitchcock is one of the big influences on their style. When they do a violent scene, it always contains a surprise of some kind, an unpredictable and uncontrollable element, sometimes a laugh: the message, I think, is that violence is the height of human stupidity.
The Coen brothers also have something to say about greed and corruption in this movie. We get a vision of life without love and trust and the ethical codes that come from respect for other human beings. Characters are corrupted to different degrees. We hear them rationalize about the compromises they make, and some even take pride in the "ethics" that they bring to their business of using, hurting, robbing, and killing people. The movie asks the audience to reflect on its own compromises, its own fearful obedience to the system, our own inabilities to love and trust.
At the center of the film are great performances: the always-wonderful Albert Finney as the Irish boss, whose soft heart is his tragic flaw; Gabriel Byrne (remember this guy from SIESTA?) as a dark-hearted, black Irishman who is brilliant at the art of survival but too damaged to love or trust anyone; and John Turturro (ferret-faced actor who was Sal's racist son in DO THE RIGHT THING) as an especially slippery and desperate Jewish punk. There is also a great performance by a bald-headed, fat actor as the Italian crime boss (anybody catch his name?). Also, the characters in the film often refer to Turturro's character as a "Shmata" or "The Shmata." Does anybody know what this means--is it Jewish, Irish, Italian? ["Schmata" is Yiddish for "rag." --Moderator]
Altogether, a memorable bunch of grotesque characters, lost in the darkness.
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