The supporting characters can be divided into major and minor. The major ones are Charlie Meadows and Audrey Taylor who both well developed. There are several good minor ones: studio boss, producer, bellhop, detectives, and of course, Mayhew.
I thought all of these were very well cast. In particular, I like how rich some of the characters were that had very little screen time. This seems to be achieved by starting out with some easy to identify stereotype and then giving it a wicked twist. Foremost among these is the studio head Jack Lipnick. But then consider also the elevator operator who almost doesn’t speak.
What do you think of the supporting characters both the cast and the roles?
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9 comments:
Steve Buscemi's character is one I expected to develop further but didn't. That was all right ... like the other hotel staffer, it added to their mystique not to know their story.
Agreed. I can't find an ounce of fault with ANY of the casting. Mayhew especially was fantastic — both the role and the actor — from the moment we first meet him puking in the bathroom to the bitter philosophizing in the picnic scene.
Judy Davis (I always misspell her name) was fantastic, but she's fantastic in everything she's in. Who would have picked her, an Australian, to play Mayhew's Southern love interest? She was brilliant.
I thought the bellhop and the elevator guy would play larger roles, too, but I agree with cl that it added to their mystique.
Lou, Lipnick's minion, was also perfect.
Also, Lipnick brought a couple of needs to the table: He was a caricature of heartless Hollywood; he could give anyone a case of writer's block; and repugnant as he was, he was a positive, charged character that emphasized the negative void to Barton Fink's personality.
There is an opposition between Lipnick and Mayhew that carries more weight in the film than you might guess from the minutes of screen time either have. That both characters are so well rendered helps immensely. I think you have hit what is so creepy about Lipnick, cl. The scene where he fires Lou for criticizing Fink’s working methods and then makes a big production of apology and praise that ends with kissing Fink’s shoe was brilliant. You might expect positive spin from an executive who is actually more cynical at heart. But Lipnick truly believes that Fink has some sort of magic that will bring success—good box office—and he is overjoyed. That kind of faith is scary. And the hapless Fink tries to turn to Mayhew for support only to find him to be a cynic who is positive about nothing and who has no faith in anything except the power of alcohol to blot out the world.
Is Lipnick supposed to be a capricious God — now demanding, now lenient, now brutal, now forgiving, now fatherly, now dictatorly, now life-giving, now life-destroying, etc. — and Barton is at his mercy. We can never please God. We are his plaything, even though he takes pride in us as his creatures. Barton's pride is the deadly sin that will keep him out of heaven — and out of Hollywood success.
Sorry, that last comment is a jumbled mess. I'm just trying to think through the film as some sort of biblical allegory.
Barton sees his story in the Bible, literally — just before Let there be light. His story precedes the creation myth. Do you make anything of that?
And the Godlike Lipnick says he doesn't want anything from Barton except a story. Can you tell a story?
But Barton can't tell a story, really. Or maybe he has only one story in him. Or maybe all stories are really the same story.
I like that theory.
Hmm. I’ll go with the one story in him strand. I liked that bit where he imagined his own lines at the start of the Bible. I don’t know that he imagines all stories are the same, he seems too intellectually advanced for that and he did show real enthusiasm for Mayhew’s novels. But his own talents are so limited—if he had to make up a story about the origins of the world, he’d have no choice but to set it in the Lower East Side.
Some of the success was with casting, but some of it was good direction, I think. One thing I loved about the casting was the interesting faces -- it reminded me of a non-American film (such as Amelie) in the faces.
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