Grade:        C

Moral:        Hold onto your hat.

A Chinese box of homage and affectation but light on their personality and askew humanity, the Coens’ Miller’s Crossing is cold, precise, and pointedly stagy. Along with Barton Fink (they’re functionally one and the same, anyway), it suddenly elucidates why some are put-off by the brothers: elsewhere their obsessive technique is purposed by unbridled enthusiasm and concussive stories, but here it’s front-and-center, the raison d’etre. In no way could one even suggest it’s qualitatively ‘bad,’ given its baroque artistry and wellsprings of meaning devoted practically to every shot, but its a curiously translucent movie, one that seems determined to place itself in a snow globe and be marveled at, but never really enjoyed.

There are moments that alleviate the ostentation and arms-length theatrics, particularly Albert Finney chomping a cigar while double-fisting tommy-guns, possibly the most singularly awesome thing in the Coens’ entire body of work. Of course it has its fervent champions and, indeed, usually winds up at the top of lit-theory critics’ best-of lists for the Coens, presumably by dint of its quiet but over-loaded imagery (hats = manhood!) and by making no concessions whatsoever towards being generally accessible.

This isn’t to say that Miller’s Crossing is iconoclastic or jarringly bizarre, but the opposite: it’s wind-up filmmaking, something that seems preemptively intended for film classes, something so immaculate and septic that, by the end, you want to douse the screen in mud. The Coens had established themselves as the anarchist-specialists of the mainstream with their pitch-perfect Raising Arizona (and, to a lesser degree, their debut, Blood Simple.), and with Miller’s Crossing they swung oppositely and crafted something that, in its vague pomposity, seems like little beyond a plea to the beard-strokers to take them seriously. Good for their career, maybe, but disaffecting otherwise.