Miller's Crossing dvd movie.|
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List Price: $9.98 Our Price: $7.99 You Save: $1.99 Features • Anamorphic • Closed-captioned • Color • DVD-Video • Widescreen • NTSC In Theaters : October, 1990 DVD Release : 20 May, 2003 |
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Miller's Crossing description Arguably the best film by Joel and Ethan Coen, the 1990 Miller's Crossing stars Gabriel Byrne as Tom, a loyal lieutenant of a crime boss named Leo (Albert Finney) who is in a Prohibition-era turf war with his major rival, Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito). A man of principle, Tom nevertheless is romantically involved with Leo's lover (Marcia Gay Harden), whose screwy brother (John Turturro) escapes a hit ordered by Caspar only to become Tom's problem. Making matters worse, Tom has outstanding gambling debts he can't pay, which keeps him in regular touch with a punishing enforcer. With all the energy the Coens put into their films, and all their focused appreciation of genre conventions and rules, and all their efforts to turn their movies into ironic appreciations of archetypes in American fiction, they never got their formula so right as with Miller's Crossing. With its Hammett-like dialogue and Byzantine plot and moral chaos mitigated by one hero's personal code, the film so transcends its self-scrutiny as a retro-crime thriller that it is a deserved classic in its own right. --Tom Keogh |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Cinematic miracle - the Coen's fuse many audio/visual opposites into a coherent whole |
| "Miller's Crossing" Is best described as that "stylish Coen Bros. Gangster Movie". Instead of the southwestern types populating "Raising Arizona" and "Blood Simple", we have the "Dapper Dans" and fast-talking molls of some nameless Prohibition-era metropolis. Seething with an endless array of illicit dealing (speakeasies, bookmaking, fight-fixing), the city is barely held together by boss Lee O'Bannon (Albert Finney). Even the Police Chief and the Mayor pay unquestioned deference to O'Bannon who, when times get desperate, proves he's still an artist with a Tommygun. Nobody gets big without O'Bannon's permission, but the crime boss has a weakness - Verna Birnbaum (Marcia Gay Harden).
Lee's obsession with Verna proves fatal because he feels obligated to protect her no-good brother Bernie, an utter creep marked for death by lower crime boss Johnny Caspar. Gabriel Byrne is Tommy Regan, Lee's right-hand man and also his conscience. Regan cautions his boss to dump Verna - he knows that both she and her brother aren't worth going to war over. But he's also fallen for Verna. When O'Bannon ignores Tom, he sparks a mob war that soon threatens his primacy and catapults Caspar to the ultimate power. Tom must navigate an uncertain path as Caspar's new confidante, one that brings him to blows with Caspar's right-hand man, and will see him realize his true feelings for Verna. This was a great movie, with an uncommon sense of sound and visual artistry. Putting aside the plot, full of characters with shifting motives, the Coens display their great ear for unforgettable dialog and expression. Their never-named city manages to be more cartoonishly realized than those that appeared in the many Batman-clones that appeared in the early 1990's when "Crossing" was released. The Coen's rely on their gift for visual irony - their city is populated with Cops who strut proudly even though conscious that they are tools of the bosses. (In my favorite scene, Tom takes a chair to an oversized enforcer sent to rough him up; his "victim's" expression - like a child on the verge of tears - is priceless.) At its heart, "Crossing" is an impossible mix of contradictions - with action both fast and slow, rough and smooth, heavy and light, best shown in a scene where Finney single-handedly turns the tables on would-be assassins, and the rat-a-tat of his submachine gun shares our attentions with the poignant sounds of "O Danny Boy". Not quite the collection of sight-gags familiar in stock Coen fare like "Intolerable Cruelty" or "O' Brother", the film is best compared to a dream that Gabriel Byrne's character describes to Verna, of chasing his hat through the wind. Byrne calls the sight of a grown man chasing something pathetic, but Verna thinks that hat an image that will change into something beautiful. Even if you don't buy the story, the film's mix of imagery will prove unforgettable. |
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