therewillbeblus wrote:This is a film about a lot of things, but one that I'm fairly certain about is the boundless risks that spawn from social and emotional engagement, and how we respond to those to protect ourselves and others, at times from a safe distance without full awareness of the 'reasons' under the iceberg of our psyches driving us.
That’s a really good way of putting it, and I think it gets at the reason why I like
Miller’s Crossing so much more than any other Coen Brothers films. Most of the time, I feel like the Coens aren’t willing to risk getting emotionally invested in their characters. They prefer maintaining a distance, and this means that a lot of their films are just cynical and hard-nosed (nothing wrong with that in itself), while others feel like they have a gaping hole at their centre, or they come across as false and sentimental when they do try for emotional depth.
Miller’s Crossing is a perfect fit for their sensibility because it’s specifically about emotional repression and the dangers of commitment or attachment, so the thing I find problematic in their other films is the focal point of this one. The whole film is shot through with this theme and, amid the complex plotting, it articulates all the relevant ideas very clearly, giving the story a sense of coherence and emotional resonance; but it simultaneously manages not to spell the theme out too obviously or mawkishly, maintaining its cool façade in a way that feels wholly appropriate.
Here I'd like to underline twbb’s earlier point about the unwelcome bond formed between Tom and Bernie after their ordeal in the woods:
therewillbeblus wrote:…while there is potential for sympathy between these two men in another life, in a neutral space where their respective actions don't affect the other, this can't exist in one of both colliding wills and suppressed emotional grievance. The idea of harmony is dissolved due to the fact that Bernie is actionably creating negative consequences within the social context of constructed rules, but also because of how they hurt each other's feelings. Though they both try to swallow this sensitivity and rationalize their behaviors to the former logical reason, we sense (and Bernie even begins to express this hurt before reverting back to the pragmatics of his revenge) that the emotions are driving these actions. And of course we often detest people most who remind us of our own non-preferred qualities- so it makes sense!
That scene where Bernie pleads for his life, which significantly takes place at the mid-point of the film, also stands out as the most 'emotionally naked' moment. The scene has a huge impact on me every time: despite knowing how he will blackmail Tom later on, I always find Bernie’s frenzied plea for mercy utterly harrowing.
This is down to a lot of things, but primarily the acting. Turturro’s performance here goes so far beyond what you would expect in a scene like this, and takes the scene to a level that should feel insanely over-the-top, but doesn’t because it’s perfectly judged and measured at the level of the smallest detail. Anyone can flail and scream hysterically, but it takes real skill to do this with such conviction. Bernie’s breakdown in the forest feels completely authentic to me: Turturro goes to a very dark place when he incoherently spits out the words ‘this is some hop dream’ and you can barely make out what he’s saying, or when he screams over and over again, ‘I can’t die out here in the woods like a dumb animal’.
The key thing, I think, is that it’s so
embarrassing. It’s not Tom Haverford in Parks and Rec, bursting into tears until you’re so disgusted that you’ll do anything to make him stop – it’s the tragic version of that, where you look at Bernie and see the naked, shivering, spluttering reality of the human condition; the panicking, cornered animal that we all turn into at the moment of death. There’s a moment in
Red Harvest where a character is dying and refuses to show any pain or fear, and the narrator says something like, ‘He was determined to die as he had lived, in that same hard shell.’ In this scene Tom Reagan, filmed from a low angle, his expression as hard as a rock, stalking onwards in perfect harmony with the camera, embodies that hard shell, and the confrontation between that image and the reverse-shots of Bernie (stumbling around, adjusting his braces, looking back over his shoulder, and finally losing all equilibrium and collapsing to his knees) packs an enormous existential punch. The music sounds like – I don’t know how to put this any better – mortality itself, looming slowly but inevitably towards Bernie, with Tom as its instrument, with tolling chimes and needling strings that sound like spirits reaching up to drag Bernie into the underworld. This is what actually happens when you ‘take him into the woods and whack him’.
A possible loose-end in a generally airtight plot: it’s not entirely convincing that neither Frankie nor Tic-Tac would accompany Tom on this errand. But then again I think the film works hard to get away with this. Partly I think this is where the ‘triviality’ of the gangsters pays off; it’s in character for them to prefer hanging around by the car and drinking, because they like each other’s company and they don’t take their work seriously (notice Tic-Tac rolling his eyes when repeating his boss’s rule about ‘putting one in the brain’). But in this case it also makes sense because why would anyone willingly subject themselves to the traumatic experience Tom has here?
The question at the heart of the near-execution scene is, what do you do if you’re in Tom’s place? You’re looking at a man, Bernie, whose ‘manly resolve’ has completely disintegrated and who will not disguise any of the terror he feels when faced with death.
Leo regards himself as invulnerable, some minor characters (like the Sam Raimi gunman) die as though they expect to re-spawn a few seconds later, and even Tom – when placed in the same position as Bernie – limits himself to staring mournfully up into the trees before collapsing and vomiting; he understands what’s about to happen and the snappy dialogue dries up, but insofar as he expresses his fear, he does so involuntarily.
Not so Bernie: he externalises everything that’s going on inside him, exposing his ‘heart’ completely. He repeatedly asks Tom to at least acknowledge that he has these same fears in his heart. If you can feel that connection to another person, on that most basic level of empathising with their fear of death, how can you kill them? The question never arises as long as we stay inside our hard shells and refuse to communicate or connect, and inhabiting a world like that is one of the great pleasures of the Dashiell Hammett / film noir / gangster genre. But in the best examples of this genre there are always moments when the cracks show, when Phyllis Dietrichson discovers feelings she didn't know she had, or Ned Beaumont stares ruefully at the empty space left by his former master.
Part of the ‘genre commentary’ in
Miller’s Crossing involves taking these moments of vulnerability and amplifying them, within a surrounding narrative that also amplifies the artifice and absurdity of the genre’s conventions, language, and so on. (By the way I love the running joke about Rug’s hair – ‘They took his hair, Tommy… Jesus that’s strange’ / ‘Why did Mink take Rug’s hair?’ ‘Ah beats me, the kid was dizzy’ – and it feels like a parody of the ‘Who killed the chauffeur?’ aspect of the Chandler/Hammett-type mysteries, where the plotting is so intricate and detailed that you end up with too many loose ends and you find yourself obsessively trying to resolve them all.) By playing up both sides of this equation, the film ends up doing more than just toying with genre tropes, and asks profound questions about why we tell and enjoy stories like this, and what they tell us about repression, vulnerability, and so on.
To get back on point: Bernie’s frenzy is naked and embarrassing. So yes, it’s no wonder that he feels so humiliated by this, and is so intent on getting his revenge on Tom – not just for betraying him, but for making him show such vulnerability, as if that were the worst thing one person could do to another. ‘I guess I made kind of a fool of myself out there. Bawling away like a twist. You didn’t tell anyone about that? … Of course,
you know about it.’
That phrase ‘like a twist’ is also used by Leo when Tom storms out on him: ‘Goddamn kid’s just like a twist!’ It means that Tom is too sensitive, too easily offended, too attached (‘Mother hen, eh?’), and it’s another embarrassing moment: Leo’s credibility has been crucially undermined in front of O’Doole and the mayor, but it's also embarrassing in the way that a lovers’ tiff is (for those who have to witness it), compromising the polished, professional appearance of the Leo/Tom relationship that we saw in the first scene.
It’s also telling that Bernie responds so viciously to Tom’s (brilliant) ‘But what have I done for you lately?’ wisecrack: ‘Don’t smart me. See, I wanna watch you squirm. I wanna see you sweat a little. And when you smart me, it
ruins it.’ Tom doesn’t get to be the smart, hard shell anymore – now he has the be the vulnerable one. ‘You make me laugh, Tommy. You’re gonna catch cold and then you’re no good to me.’ Bernie even mocks him for his over-sensitivity in the face of his (Bernie's!) vulnerability: ‘I’d just squirt a few and then you’d let me go again.’ You’d have to be so weak and soft, ‘like a twist’, to be moved to sympathy by someone who just ‘squirts a few’; but of course we know that Bernie did a lot more than that, and was not putting on an act, and now he's trying to save face.
When Tom hears Bernie’s plea to ‘Look in your heart’ at the end and responds, ‘What heart?’ before (loyal to Caspar’s instructions) putting one in the brain, I don’t think he’s saying ‘I have no heart’, but rather is asking a different rhetorical question: ‘What [do you know about my] heart?’ (cf. Leo earlier, ‘Maybe you’re wrong about this, you don’t know what’s in Verna’s heart’, and again, Tom’s repeated insistence that ‘No one knows anyone’). The point is not that Tom has no feelings, but that this time he won’t allow Bernie access to them. He made the mistake of allowing that connection to form in the woods, but this time the hard shell remains intact. Like the operative in
Red Harvest, Tom is by this point resigned to being ‘blood-simple’ and meting out death without hesitation or remorse. His rhetorical question lets Bernie know that, with everything else that’s happened, it is now presumptuous to think that Tom has too much empathy to gun a guy down.
In short, Tom isn’t denying his feelings, but he is closing himself off having been burned too much and too often by human attachments, and he is also signalling that whatever constitutes his ‘heart’ is now capable of cold-blooded murder, at least in this case. It’s both a very satisfying, cathartic, and ‘cool’ moment of resolution, and a really tragic conclusion to the ‘problem of Bernie’. It encompasses everything that has gone before, including the emotional impact of the scenes in the woods and of all the deaths, betrayals, and other sacrifices that have been set in motion by Bernie’s chiselling and Leo’s refusal to play by the rules. It makes complete sense that Tom does this, and it’s sort of a relief; but it also carries a huge cost, and there’s still something poignant about Bernie’s look of utter bewilderment when that tiny hole appears in his forehead.
Then we come to the ending, and the other moment of resolution and catharsis:
Mr Sausage wrote:Leo doesn’t understand this; he tries to resume things as tho’ nothing had changed, and takes Tom’s reaction to the offer of reconciliation as simple, petty rejection, to which Leo has an uncomplicated reaction of annoyance. Tom has a more complicated understanding of what’s happened, and stares at Leo with concern and loss, but without doubt or insecurity. Tom’s final look is that of an old lover who has to give up the longest, most important relationship of his life because he knows love isn’t enough to keep it going.
In that central relationship, one party is perceptive and sensitive, less dominant, more other-focussed, a caretaker. The other party is willful, dominant, a provider and safety-net, but self-focused, lacking awareness, expecting others to take care of him without understanding what that care means to them nor what they go through to provide it.
(The second paragraph here reminds me a lot of
Raising Arizona (my next-favourite Coen Brothers film) – not sure where to go with that but wanted to mention it.)
That’s a great analysis of the difference between Tom’s and Leo’s reactions. Leo is so oblivious and clueless about what has really happened. Calling what Tom has done a ‘smart play’ seems reductive to us, having witnessed everything first-hand, and Leo is also missing something crucial when he says ‘I supposed you picked that fight with me just to chuck yourself in with Caspar?’ Tom replies, ‘I don’t know. Do you always know why you do things?’ And Leo just says, complacently, ‘Sure I do.’ This harks back to their earlier exchange where Leo says ‘You do anything to help your friends like you do anything to kick your enemies’ and Tom retorts, ‘Wrong, Leo. You do things for a reason.’
At first the two conversations seem to contradict each other, as if Tom by the end has lost track of his reasons for doing things. But I think another key detail here is where Tom says that ‘there just wasn’t any point’ in telling Leo what he was up to. He already tried as hard as he could to talk sense into Leo, and failed. Tom knows why he did all these things; but he's past the point of wanting to sustain his bond with Leo by telling him about these reasons. What would have been the point in explaining to Leo what it took to take care of him and straighten things out for him, when he was clearly too narcissistic to appreciate or understand this? Leo is eager to throw money at Tom, or to demand help (‘Help me out Tom, I wouldn’t know where to start looking’, ‘I’d give anything if you’d come and work for me again – I need you’), but he never really does anything to indicate that he cares about Tom. It's arguably a case of unrequited love.
I particularly like your comment about the lack of doubt and insecurity in Tom’s rejection here. One of my favourite moments is when Leo magnanimously forgives Tom (‘Damn it Tom, I forgive you’, the ‘damn it’ suggesting that he’s making a generous effort here) and without missing a beat Tom says, ‘I didn’t ask for that and I don’t want it. [Long pause.] Goodbye Leo.’ There isn’t the slightest sense that Tom is making a mistake here, or that he’s just being ‘stubborn and pig-headed’ – in fact this is probably the healthiest and least self-destructive thing he does in the whole film. Like the killing of Bernie, it comes at a cost and with a sense of loss, but it’s also incredibly satisfying and makes you breathe a sigh of relief. It has that one-two-punch rhythm you find in a lot of great endings: Bernie is the problem, so Tom kills him; but then, on a deeper level, Leo is the problem, so Tom rejects him.
Going off on a bit of a tangent, something really interesting happens on the soundtrack here, and to understand it we need to look back at the other scenes in the woods.
First, at the end of the title sequence, we hear the wind blowing underneath the music as the hat drifts away into the forest. Then, when Tom takes Bernie into the woods, we hear the wind again, underneath the music and accompanying it: when Tom is pointing the gun down at Bernie, you hear the wind rise to a higher pitch twice, in two waves, with a sort of haunting, howling sound. But when the shot is fired and the music cuts out, we hear something different: the trees creaking. It’s significant that the sound first occurs when the music stops, and that it occurs again throughout the scene where Tom is led to his near-death, where there is no extra-diegetic music. To some extent, I think this means that the sound is a kind of supplementary layer to the soundtrack, fleshing out the ‘aural scene-setting’ at moments when this won’t get in the way of the score (which the wind doesn't because, unlike the creaking, it has a more musical quality).
But the sound means more than this, I think, and is obviously picking up on the detail I noted before from the screenplay, which repeatedly describes the forest sounds as ‘unearthly’. It’s kind of a horror-movie sound effect, like the timbers of a swaying ghost ship, or floorboards creaking in a haunted house. Because it’s associated with Miller’s Crossing, a location associated primarily with death, the sound evokes dead souls bristling in the trees, and it's also kind of a hollow, rattling, skeletal sound. Literally, of course, it’s the sound of the indifferent, non-sentient wood that surrounds Bernie and tells him he’s going to die ‘in the woods like a dumb animal’. We first hear it at the moment when Bernie thinks he is dead, and then is told that he’s (effectively) dead, and the sound continues to reverberate as Bernie runs away and Tom is left alone to reflect on his choice. The sound fades away as Tom returns to the car, and we next hear it when he is brought back to Miller’s Crossing and has to face death himself. Having Frankie singing ‘La Ghirlandeina’ here provides a poignant contrast: it’s an obliviously sentimental, joyful song about Frankie’s ancestral homeland, while Tom’s ears are filled with the ominous creaking of the woods and the Dane’s cold-blooded taunts. This adds another layer of meaning to Tom’s gaze up into the canopy – he’s listening to the trees as well as looking at them.
For me, the most important thing here is the thematic link between the confrontation with mortality in the scene with Bernie, Tom’s empathic decision to spare his life, and the mortal danger this puts him in. The doom-filled music in the earlier scene represented Tom, the agent of death bearing down on his victim; when he gave up that role, he suddenly found himself hearing what Bernie had been hearing when
he was looking frantically up at the trees; and that’s the sound that fills his ears again now that his number is up. (This is one reason why it’s so important to have a brief reprise of the ‘killing Bernie’ music when Tom finally does kill him, and why it feels like there’s something missing from the tampered-with blu-ray versions: Tom is reclaiming the role he had renounced before, and the repetition of the musical motifs helps to underline this narrative arc.)
We next hear the creaking of the trees in the final scene, but it doesn’t kick in until just after Tom says ‘Goodbye Leo’. Again, it helps to fill out the soundtrack for a few moments while there’s no dialogue and no score, so it does have an important ‘pragmatic’ function. But thematically, it gives weight and meaning to the rejection. Even if we only register it subliminally, that haunting creaking noise means death, and specifically it means
Tom’s awareness of death. I’m repeating my earlier point here, but I think the soundtrack (among other things) is linking Tom’s rejection to the multiple deaths he has caused, been complicit in, or witnessed, and perhaps most of all to the death he almost suffered himself.
How could Leo understand any of this? How could Tom explain it to him? The ‘Danny Boy’ sequence, taken on its own terms, is very ‘cool’, and Leo is ‘an artist with a Thompson’, but I don’t think we’re invited to have an uncomplicatedly flippant response to this scene, and on one level it tells us that Leo is a sociopath. Take the machine-gunning of the assassin in the window: in a sense it’s absurd and funny, but there’s also something vividly horrifying about a corpse being held aloft by tommy-gun fire, dancing around and still spraying bullets from its own gun. Maybe I’m going too deep here, but we’re watching a dead man behave as though he were still alive, and there’s a link between this and Leo’s delusional attitude towards mortality. He’s surrounded by danger and all he hears is a sentimental Irish song – his version of ‘La Ghirlandeina’. (I also feel like there's a subliminal association between this flailing dead man and Bernie flapping his arms around in the woods.)
No sooner have we seen Leo coolly posing with tommy-gun and cigar than Tom bursts in on him with a series of rebukes: how does Leo not understand how vulnerable he is, how close he came to dying, how much this war will ‘hurt everyone’ and ‘mean killing’; how does none of this register with him? Mr S has commented on Leo’s annoyed, bemused expression at the end of the film, and this recalls his reaction when Tom reveals his affair with Verna. First he laughs, as if Tom has made a joke; then he makes a strange groaning noise which I always take to mean, ‘Damn it, now I have to think about this in order to figure out how to respond’; and then he just opts for the dumbest, most obvious, macho-posturing response and beats the shit out of a man who is putting up absolutely no defence. To quote Mr S again:
Mr Sausage wrote:Tom’s weird thing with Leo makes sense if you understand it as a long-term romantic relationship, but a homosocial one where desire is displaced onto a woman they both share. Tom, the more knowing of the two, knows he’s interacting with Leo on this level and is ambivalent; Leo is oblivious, and when he finds out, abusive.
Part of what’s frustrating about Leo is his refusal to take his relationship with Tom, or with anything, seriously - he never thinks about anything. In the relationship between Tom and Verna, it is Tom's apparent failure to care (though not to think) that causes problems. I'm responding here to some of the earlier readings of Verna in this thread: I think one of the poignant things about Verna is how obviously hurt she is by Tom’s wisecracks and assumption that 'playing the angle' is all anyone in this world can do. For instance, when she says, ‘You think last night was just more campaigning for my brother?’ she seems (to me) totally sincere, and is urging Tom to take her feelings for him seriously. He responds by grabbing her and insulting her, and she calls him a ‘pathetic rum-head’ (read: ‘you don’t mean that, you’re just saying it because you’re drunk – go home and dry out’); then Tom drunkenly sneers ‘And I love you angel’ and kisses her against her will. There are lots of reasons for her to be angry here, and to punch him, but most of all I think her anger is a response to Tom’s brutal parody of feelings that, for her, are profound and earnest (cf. ‘Goodnight Sweetheart’ playing over Leo’s ‘kiss-off’).
You see this earnestness most clearly after Verna has been dumped by Leo: she’s not even particularly angry at Tom, looks forward to leaving town with him, and kisses him affectionately when he later gives her the vague update about Bernie. His guilty face at this moment tells us that he knows how she feels, and probably (I think) feels the same way about her, but is locked out of expressing this by circumstances. Perhaps he cares just as little for Verna as Leo does for him, but his pained expression when Leo tells him he and Verna are getting married suggests that Tom does ‘love’ her in some way. But this is a complicated issue, and to analyse this aspect of the film, I think you’d need to compare it with the ending of
The Glass Key – especially the version in the novel, which is more sobering than in the film. And of course, as twbb noted earlier, Tom’s loss of both relationships recalls the ending of
The Third Man, a film the Coens frequently watch when preparing to make a new film (I think I heard this on the Joel Coen episode of the Team Deakins podcast).
…
Just to ramble on a bit – because this opportunity doesn’t come along every fortnight – I’d like to go back to twbb’s very first point in this thread:
therewillbeblus wrote:This is on the shortlist of the most engaging, simply entertaining movie experiences I've ever had and continue to have each watch, in addition to its thematic and emotional power. It's interesting, exciting, witty, hilarious, and tragic.
Yes - above all, this is just an amazingly well-made, entertaining film.
The colours, for example, are perfect: there’s just enough sepia, green, brown, pink, red, and black, in just the right combinations and just the right number of scenes, starting with that beautiful first shot of the drinks cabinet. It’s not just that each individual scene looks great, it’s that the overall visual rhythm (within and between scenes) is so well judged: in a film that’s as heavy on dialogue and exposition as this one, it’s important to vary the settings and colours, and this film manages that in perfect harmony with its period-specific world-building.
That world-building, more generally, is another of the main reasons why this film is so special to me. Period films – including some made by the Coens – can become tiresome when it feels like they’re ‘playing’ too much with the period trappings, or when they don’t do so with real conviction (and I'd say conviction rather than authenticity is what counts here). I know some people feel that way about this film, seeing it as a cartoonish and messy pastiche that's all style and no substance. But it seems to me that
Miller’s Crossing is so in love with its Prohibition-era setting, and with the Dashiell Hammett tropes and language, and so thoroughly committed to inhabiting them and putting them together into a meaningful story, that it’s a textbook example of what a really good pastiche can accomplish.
It also has to be said that there’s something about the setting and its aesthetic, and the way the Coens use this, that appeals to me on a hard-to-define and largely unconscious level, and that may even be the primary reason why I’ve been obsessively re-watching this film since I was 14. It’s a place I love to spend time in.
I love Barry Sonnenfeld’s cinematography, and as great as Roger Deakins is (and the other cinematographers they’ve worked with), I think something is missing in
Barton Fink and the subsequent films, compared to those first three. I’m not knowledgeable enough to say what that missing thing is, but it’s something like life, or energy, or wit, or at least the particular kinds of life, energy, and wit that Sonnenfeld brings… He made a conscious decision to tone down his hyperactive style and fondness for wide-angle lenses, and opt for a more ‘handsome’ approach in this film, and as with the colour-scheme, the dynamic between static telephoto-lens shots and wide shots that establish the settings and spatial relations is finely tuned in every scene. And then, what an impact it has when the Dane says ‘That ain’t all we know, smart guy – recognise your playmate?’ and we get that characteristic Sonnenfeld camera movement, pushing in dramatically like an excited child towards the faces of Drop Johnson and then Tom, then repeating this movement at several other key moments in the scene, including Tom’s reaction to the Dane’s death. Saving up these camera moves is such an effective way of amplifying the intensity of this climactic scene. (And what a great set that cavernous, hellish room is.)
The timing of the editing, the shot-reverse-shots, the sound effects, it’s all perfect. One detail I particularly like: notice the repetition of, ‘Hello Tom. [Door closes behind Tom.] You know O’Doole and the mayor.’ The timing of the closing door is the same in both cases, and this is what really sells the joke. I look forward to both moments, and they always make me laugh.
And now let’s talk about my favourite moment in the film. All four scenes with Bernie (not counting the phone call) are my favourites, and the one in the woods is probably the best, but it’s his first encounter with Tom that contains this unparalleled treasure:
Tom: Leo gets your sister, what are you selling me?
Bernie: Come on Tom, it’s not like that at all, it wasn’t my idea. She’ll sleep with anyone, you know that. She even tried to teach me a thing or two about bed artistry. Can you believe that? My own sister. Some crackpot idea about ‘saving me from my friends’. She’s a sick twist alright.
Tom: She speaks highly of you.
Bernie: Yeah well you stick by your family. The point is…
There are so many lovely things going on here. We get reaction shots of Tom after ‘she’ll sleep with anyone, you know that’, and then ‘can you believe that’ (the cut to Tom happens on ‘know that’ and then ‘that’, which is nice). This means that we register Bernie’s calculated dig at Tom for being attached to Verna, and the fact that he’s belittling their affair as a trivial fling (because of course Bernie wants Verna to stick with Leo); and we also register Tom’s disgust at Bernie’s insult to Verna, and maybe his own ambivalent feelings about Verna given her unhealthy attachment to Bernie (‘You me and Bernie, where would we go, Verna? Niagara Falls?’).
The medium-shot of Bernie reclining in his chair with his hands draped over the arms and his legs crossed insolently in front of him fits perfectly with his complacent dismissal of his loyal sister in the first part of his speech, and then with the ‘stick by your family’ line, but for the ‘crackpot idea…sick twist’ section of his speech we cut to a close-up of his face, focusing our attention on his emotions rather than his entitled position. This means we register the hint of self-loathing and despair when he gazes off to one side and says ‘some crackpot idea about saving me’ (setting up his existential agony in the woods), but also the shift into cold contempt when he calls his sister a ‘sick twist’ (setting up his post-Miller’s-Crossing behaviour).
Then we get the razor-sharp irony of Tom’s joke, ‘She speaks highly of you’. Just a minute earlier we heard Verna’s completely un-ironic defence of ‘poor misunderstood Bernie’, and now Tom picks the best possible way of pointing out the sad disconnect between her love for Bernie and Bernie’s contempt for her. Then Bernie supplies the punchline: ‘Yeah well you stick by your family.’ It’s not that he doesn’t register the irony in what Tom just said – you couldn’t miss it – it’s that he genuinely regards this principle as self-evident when it works in his favour, but wouldn’t even contemplate living up to it in his treatment of Verna…which, again, sets up so much of his subsequent behaviour.
The whole exchange also tells us a lot, without being specific, about Verna and Bernie. You get a sense of this brother and sister, growing up without other forms of support in a hostile world, bound together with uncomfortable intimacy, Verna always looking out for Bernie, Bernie resenting his dependency on her, Verna going to desperate extremes to curb his self-destructive tendencies, Bernie despising her and using her all the more intently. The fact that Verna went as far as trying incest is, to Bernie, merely evidence of what a ‘sick twist’ she is; Tom’s implied sympathy for Verna encourages us to see it in a different light, as evidence of how blind, unconditional, and even self-destructive Verna’s love for her brother is. In fact this is another reason why Tom kills Bernie in the end: it’s Verna, even more than Leo, who needs saving from this guy.
There are so many moments like this in the film that combine exposition, character development, humour, and pathos. But this is my favourite one. Maybe my second favourite, though it's not quite as layered, is the exchange between the Dane and the unnamed, unseen gangster in the car:
What's that potato-eater up to?
Beats me.
That's Bernie's sister, ain't it?
Beats me.
Well what's he seeing her for?
Beats me, maybe-
Shut up. Get lost. [Car door opens and closes.] I'll see where the twist flops. [Cut to Verna's door being kicked open.]
We probably don't need to be reminded that Verna is Bernie's sister; but we need to know how the Dane knows that Verna and Tom are together; we need to know why this makes him suspicious about the supposed execution of Bernie (so that he interrogates Frankie and Tic-Tac about it); and we need to know that he's following Tom to set up his later discovery and interrogation of Drop Johnson. So we need to see the Dane following Tom, but we also need him to express all these concerns, and he can't just talk to himself. His companion in the car is a kind of parody of the exposition-enabler whose ignorance stands in for that of the audience - the dialogue here, and the fact that the other gangster is never even seen, is a great joke at the expense of this type of narrative convention, but it's also entirely in character given the Dane's relationship with the morons who populate both Caspar's and Leo's gangs.
Speaking of exposition, I love how
Miller’s Crossing tells its story, and how it reveals information in exactly the right order. You could spend all day analysing the first scene and how much it sets up, but crucially it leaves out Verna; then notice how Verna is introduced, first as the woman who made off with Tom’s hat, then as Tom’s love-interest… Then when Leo drops by and Tom says, ‘Thought about cutting Bernie loose?’, we find out about Leo’s attachment to Verna and his motive for protecting Verna just when we’re ready to do so: ‘Can’t do it, Tommy, can’t do it. In fact that’s sort of why I’m… Tommy I don’t know where Verna is.’
Or consider Mink. In plot terms, Mink is one of the most important characters in the film, yet he only appears in one scene (and his voice is heard briefly on the phone in another). This means the film has to work extra hard to make sure we know about Mink and understand who he is, where he is at a certain time, and who he’s attached to. You could make a list of all the references to Mink in the film and see how this is accomplished – simple stuff like ‘Who made off with my hat?’ ‘Verna. Verna and Mink.’ ‘Who?’ ‘MINK AND VERNA.’ Or the way Tom repeats Mink’s name several times in the one scene where he appears. And of course they cast Steve Buscemi and give him lots of fast-talking verbal tics to make him more memorable.
When Mink first greets Tom in the club he says, ‘I see you got your hat back.’ Tom says, ‘What of it?’ and Mink responds, ‘Not a thing Tommy, if it ain’t my business I got not a thing to say.’ Mink is letting Tom know that he has something on him – his affair with Verna, to which the recovered hat is a clue – just before asking for a favour… But Mink has overplayed his hand, because Tom now knows something more dangerous, which will facilitate every move he makes with Caspar: that Mink is ‘jungled up’ with Bernie as well as the Dane.
It’s all very dense and detailed, but even on a first viewing you pick up on everything you need to know, because the film takes care to underline the important stuff and make each character’s motivations (and relations with other characters) clear whenever they need to be.
Part of what helps with this is the tendency, typical of this genre, to limit the number of characters in each scene and advance the plot through a series of 1:1 conversations. Notice how many characters never interact with each other. We never see Leo with Verna (except for about a second at Bernie’s graveside) because we know everything we need to know about their relationship within ten seconds of finding out about it. On the other hand, because we never see Verna with Bernie, we need the exposition in the ladies’-room scene and the first scene with Bernie in order to understand their relationship, and the dialogue in these scenes has to work harder to get the point(s) across. We never see Bernie interact with anyone other than Tom (except briefly when he’s being roughed up by Frankie and Tic-Tac) because we have enough to keep track of with the shifting power dynamic and ambiguous emotions between these two.
Here’s an interesting one: Eddie Dane, despite appearing in a few scenes with Caspar, never really addresses him or talks directly to him – even when he says ‘Does he want a pillow for his head?’, ‘Nuts’ (one of my favourites), or ‘Mink is clean and this clown is a smart guy’, it still feels like he’s addressing Tom. Like Tom in the first scene, the Dane’s role is to stay in the background (I love how he just appears, suddenly and creepily, in the background of the shot when Tom sits down after O’Doole and the mayor leave Caspar’s office), and any conversations he has with his master need to happen behind the scenes. We learn about these conversations after the fact and when the Dane is absent, and all of this factors into our understanding of the rift that is opening up between Caspar and his henchman. Notice also how Caspar keeps addressing the Dane: ‘You hear that, Dane? My kid is as smart as a whip. Even Uncle Eddie thinks that’s funny. [Cut to the Dane, unsmiling.]’ He often does this to try and get the Dane to be more accepting and trusting of Tom – so we gradually get the impression that a bond is forming between Caspar and Tom, and that Caspar is becoming more alienated from the Dane.
One final detail, or cluster of details, that I’m very fond of… When Tom goes to see Drop Johnson, he walks down a long corridor and we hear a loud fight going on between a man and a woman. Cinematic convention would lead us to think that the yelling man is Drop Johnson, and that we’ll see the fighting couple when Tom opens the apartment door...but instead we see a large, meek man, silently eating puffed wheat and reading the funny papers. It’s a typical Coen Brothers joke, but it also has a larger function in the story: it sets up Drop as a gentle giant in opposition to the bellowing monster next door. This adds to the pathos when we find out that the Dane has tortured this poor man (‘So I grabbed the gorilla and I beat it out of him. You give me a big guy, they break easy every time’), and sets up the ‘punchline’ of this character’s arc when he actually does turn into a bellowing monster once he sees the Dane is out of action and unable to hurt him anymore.
Oh, and the sound effect when the Dane’s eyes seep out of his head is also really good.
