Obviously, the focuses of the Coen's attention in realizing Miller's Crossing were the elaborate sets and the equally elaborate action set-pieces. Compared to such intriguing figures as Fargo's Marge and Barton Fink's Audrey, or even to laugh-riots like Raising Arizona's Edwina and The Big Lebowski's Maud, Verna feels flat and obligatory. The actress, best known for originating the role of Harper in Angels in America on Broadway, has a piercing stare and a flare for playing severe, disappointed women, but she's a bitter pill to swallow.
Even when she's around, she generally serves as a catalyst for the men's behavior rather than a character in her own right. Though Harden gets off some good lines, her character disappears for long stretches of the movie. Interestingly, Frances McDormand, the director's wife, who has an unbilled cameo as a mayor's secretary, desperately wanted to play Verna, but it's hard to understand her ardor for the role. That's a lot to demand of a viewer, and though I'm all for jolting audiences out of their complacencydon't get me wrong, I'd watch Miller's Crossing again in a minute before I'd return to Hollywood drivel from the same year like Home Alone or Days of Thunderthe film, in all its plenitude, lacks two crucial ingredients: a reason to care about its plot, and an appealing or even particularly interesting character.īyrne, never a favorite actor of minehe tends to make seriousness look like self-seriousnesshas too flinty a screen persona to invite identification, and he's a teddy bear compared to John Turturro and Marcia Gay Harden. The Coen brothers not only expect their audience to keep track of a byzantine plot, but we are clearly meant to appreciate both the critiques of genre (gangland melodrama, noir thriller, slapstick comedy) and references to specific films ( The Godfather, On the Waterfront, even Diabolique in reverse) they plant like cherry bombs all over the picture. Ultimately, this combination of visual abundance, narrative overflow, and relentless self-consciousness made Miller's Crossing, for all its technical proficiency and enterprising spirit, a bit wearying to sit through. (The geographical relationships within the unnamed city, and between the city and the outdoors, is kept stubbornly but amusingly vague.) Even the found locations seem unbelievably outsized, including a thicket of infinitely tall trees.
The purposefully absurd frequency of these assaults is emblematic of all sorts of excess on display in Miller's Crossing in addition to the bounty of characters and heap of plot twists, the film contains several repeated shots, a flood dialogue with its own tendency to reprise itself, and a seemingly endless series of expensive-looking sets and costumes that, as in Hudsucker dazzle in their Art Deco detailing even as they flaunt their own artificiality. A running gag in Miller's Crossing is that Byrne is forever getting punched, kicked, and battered by all the people he threatens and angers. Obviously, his appetite for her and his loyalty to Leo are a combustible combination, and with so many loose cannons running aroundparticularly the irate Caspar, the insufferable Bennie, and an always-scowling hood named Dane with uncertain allegiances of his ownTom is in for his fair share of beatings.
In a movie full of sidewinder complications, the most important is that Byrne's character is also Verna's very jealous lover. Despite his fondness for Caspar, Leo refuses to dispense with Bennie because he is the brother of Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), a tough-as-nails broad (think Annette Bening in Bugsy) who sleeps with the much older Leo in return for his protection of Bennie. The film begins, in an obvious nod to The Godfather, with a character named Caspar (Joe Polito) begging the powerful Leo to do him a favor: in this case, rubbing out an "unethical" bookie named Bennie. Gabriel Byrne stars as Tom Reagan, a mobster in the sometimes reluctant employ of a kingpin named Leo (Albert Finney, most recently seen as Julia's partner-boss in Erin Brockovich). Closer to the enormous gizmo-ness of Barton Fink and The Hudsucker Proxy than the equally studied but much more inviting Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, and Fargo, this gangster-movie-cum-noir-spoof has enough plot and ambition for four pictures. Miller's Crossing might, in its way, be the most important movie in the Coen brother's canon, but for me, at least, it also ranks as one of the most frustrating. Freeman, Steve Buscemi, Frances McDormand. Cast: Gabriel Byrne, Albert Finney, Marcia Gay Harden, John Turturro, Joe Polito, J.E.