Miller's Crossing

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Movie Details

• Genre: Drama, Suspense/Thriller
• Release Date: 0000-00-00
• Running Time: 115 min.
• Director: Joel Coen
• Cast: Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden, John Turturro, Jon Polito, J.E. Freeman
• Producer:
• Writer: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
• Distributor:
• Official Site: Miller's Crossing Official Site

A measured, ironic Ph.D. thesis on Dashiell Hammett and film noir, this 1990 film by Joel and Ethan Coen boasts Caravaggio lighting, a stately tempo, and a quietly immodest approach to its own mastery. Like David Lynch turning noir icons into the human haircuts of Lost Highway, the Coens arrange their glossed-up B movie archetypes--including the stoically hard-boiled young hoodlum (Gabriel Byrne) who comes between his boss (Albert Finney) and the boss's girl (Marcia Gay Harden)--in compositions that suggest a state funeral for Stanley Kubrick. The set pieces suggest a close study of spaghetti Westerns, but the prevailing mood--a long tommy-gun ballet set to "Danny Boy"--is gravitas all the way. (The brothers instructed their cinematographer to watch The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which wouldn't have been my choice.) Byrne and Harden manage only a flailing, TV-style flatness: For once, the Coens' casting instincts deserted them. And despite the intricacy and elegance of the plot, Miller's Crossing remains notable mainly as a warm-up for the siblings' subsequent triumph, Barton Fink, a movie as blazingly original as this one is mired in quotation marks. (Matthew Wilder)