The Coen Brothers’ movie-nerd gangster fantasia

Miller’s Crossing actually debuted at the New York Film Festival a couple of days after Goodfellas hit theaters nationwide; unlike the Scorsese film (which was a solid if unspectacular hit), the Coen movie didn’t reach much beyond that movie-nerd paradise. This makes sense, because perhaps more than any other Coen movie, Miller’s Crossing is a movie-nerd project.

While Scorsese must have been influenced by the Warner Bros. gangster movies of the 1930s, a movie like Goodfellas is, by the nature of its subject and when it was produced, grittier, bloodier, and more profane. Coppola’s Godfather trilogy, meanwhile, gives mafia material, once fodder for lurid pre-Code thrillers, a stately grandeur. The Coens borrow more directly from work contemporary to the 1929 setting of Miller’s Crossing, including master pulp writer Dashiell Hammett, as well as the snappy gangster movies of the 1930s and noirs of the 1940s. Some of their subsequent crime movies have plenty of well-deployed profanities, but Miller’s Crossing has more stylized patter, with multiple characters greeting each other with, “What’s the rumpus?” Perhaps the single most enduring aspect of the movie isn’t a single line or scene, but the short-fused Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito) repeatedly invoking the “high hat” others are giving him (that is, condescending to him).

The movie’s dialogue, while faithful to the clipped style of an old gangster picture, also verges on screwball at times, a period-specific genre that often creeps into the Coens’ work. The two movies they made before Miller’s Crossing were Blood Simple (a nasty noir) and Raising Arizona (a neo-screwball farce); their gangster movie splits the difference between the two. The plot is a series of labyrinthine negotiations and manipulations, as Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne), an Irish gangster whose name is phonetically similar to Tom Hagan (Robert Duvall) from the first two Godfather movies, plays two criminal gangs against each other. With a little more dialogue, it would be farce; with a little less, it would be a ruthless massacre (and plenty of people get gunned down as-is).

Generally speaking, these machinations connect to the money and power that drive the characters in The Godfather and Goodfellas. Yet Tom doesn’t seem to actively lust for either; he’s neither venal nor regal in his ambitions. Though he’s sleeping with Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), moll to his boss Leo O’Bannon (Albert Finney), that relationship doesn’t especially motivate him, either. He’s going through the motions of a genre plot, all as, per another character’s description, “the man who walks behind the man and whispers in his ear.”

The Coens have been accused of something similar: playing manipulative gods to the ill fates of their hapless characters. In some ways, Miller’s Crossing is the movie where this mischaracterization comes closest to applying. In a movie like A Serious Man, the fates are crueler, yet also part of a greater thematic design and outlook on life. Miller’s Crossing is less of a “nightmare comedy,” as the Museum of the Moving Image has memorably classified A Serious Man, and less suffused with existential ennui than The Man Who Wasn’t There, another Coen crime picture with darker noir shadows.

In the context of 1990’s other gangster movies, Miller’s Crossing feels more faithful to old crime classics, and more subversive of their thrills; the more older crime movies you’ve seen and love, the easier it is to get on its wavelength. Goodfellas calls back to earlier cinema, too — one of its final shots visually quotes The Great Train Robbery, a Western crime movie from 1903, with Joe Pesci repeatedly firing a gun at the camera. It’s a way of acknowledging the crime picture’s aggressive allure, embedded in the fabric of the movies; the violence can be symbolically aimed at the audience, and still we watch with excitement. It also emphasizes the immediacy of Scorsese’s film apart from its references. By comparison, Miller’s Crossing feels wearier and more elegiac, though perhaps not as old-man tired as Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part III.

Image: 20th Century Studios

The Coens finished the screenplay after a bout with writer’s block that inspired Barton Fink (which would be their next film, debuting less than a year after this one). That movie is specifically about writer’s block; Miller’s Crossing addresses it in a more oblique way. The slang-heavy loquaciousness of the gangster characters shows the Coens’ love of words — Steve Buscemi’s single scene, where he rattles off what sounds like pages of dialogue in just a couple of minutes, feels like a particular testament to that. Yet their nominal hero Tom Reagan remains on the quieter side. He doesn’t lament, like Corleone (“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”) or bullshit with the boys, like the Goodfellas crew (“Funny like I’m a clown, I amuse you?”). When the Coens pay homage to screwball or noir, there’s a joyousness to it. Their concept of the gangster movie as a cross between those two disparate genres is movie-nerd clever. It’s also, by design, less exhilarating than the heady rush of misdeeds that Scorsese depicts.

At the same time, Miller’s Crossing is not the work of filmmakers at the end of their rope. It’s beautifully shot by Barry Sonnenfeld, who was about to embark upon his own directing career with The Addams Family the following year. It’s often hilarious, especially when Polito is gassing on about the high hat or calling people yeggs (slang for criminal types). The movie’s quiet sense of unease is teased out more elegantly in Fargo, No Country for Old Men, or even the more traditional Western heroics of True Grit. In 1990, they didn’t quite fit in. In retrospect, they’re clearly finding their way.