Millers Crossing

I saw Millers Crossing (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1991) years ago and didn't understand it. The film has recently emerged from the shadows in the context of Judge Brett Kavanaugh's petulant and tearful address to the Senate Judiciary Committee on the afternoon of September 27, 2018.  Commenting on the sobbing that punctuated Kavanaugh's speech, Stephen King, the horror-novel writer, quoted the loathsome Bernie Birnbaum, a toxic thug in the Coen brother's movie.  The film's hero moved by Bernie's crying is unable to murder him notwithstanding demands by the mobster with which he is (momentarily) affiliated.  Later, Birnbaum arrogantly tells Tommy (the protagonist played by Gabriel Byrne):  "(If you threaten to kill me) I'll just squirt out a few and, then, you'll let me go again."  Such hubris can not go without punishment and, ultimately, Tommy kills only one person in this bloody film:  Bernie Birnbaum, shot through the brain exactly as he is pleading for mercy and vigorously expelling tears. 


Millers Crossing remains baffling to me.  It has an intricately plotted narrative that is mostly an excuse for people to batter, punch, and torture the film's protagonist, Tommy.  Clearly an exercise in neo film noir, the movie follows the convention that the hero is generally beaten up pretty thoroughly throughout the film and, even, periodically slugged unconscious.  But the Coen brothers execution of this theme is so extravagant that the film assumes the aspect of masochist's reverie -- the hero is a poor schmuck, a schlemihl, whom everyone thrashes.  In this regard, the story presages other films by the Coen brothers, particularly A Serious Man, The Man who wasn't There, and Inside Llewellyn Davis, movies that featured main characters who suffer one humiliation after another, the victims of the worst luck possible.  (The secret source for this type of narrative is Jewish and revealed in A Serious Man -- the story of Job.)  In Miller's Crossing, Tommy is a reasonable man, a criminal who serves as a kind of consiglieri to Leo, an impulsive Irish mob boss played by Albert Finney.  Another gangster, Caspar, demands that Leo kill an associate, Bernie Birnbaum (John Turturro).  Birnbaum is a reptilian homosexual and "degenerate".  But Tommy is involved in an affair with Verna, a femme fatale who is also the "twist" (girlfriend) of his boss, Leo.  Bernie is Verna's brother -- Bernie boasts that Verna tried to cure his homosexuality with her "bedroom tricks."  For some reason that is unclear -- it's the enigma at the center of the film -- Tommy defends Bernie and won't allow him to be murdered; perhaps, his obstinacy on this point is due to his love for Verna (which he won't admit even to himself) or his rationality:  he doesn't believe in violence for its own sake.  Perhaps, Tommy even has a sense of justice and doesn't think that Bernie deserves slaughter.  When Leo sends a "tail" to follow Verna, the man ends up dead and a little boy who finds the corpse in the alley snatches the man's "rug" or hairpiece.  Verna, in fact, has shot the man, but the killing gets blamed on Bernie and is thought to be particularly appalling because the murderer is said to have seized the dead man's wig as a souvenir.  This killing leads to an all-out gang war fought with Thompson machine guns and with the cops in the nameless city alternately supporting Leo and, then, his enemy Caspar.  (The war is imagined as a fight to the death between Italian and Irish mobs.)  The respective speakeasies of each mob are raided by the cops who enthusiastically join in the mayhem acting as murderers for first one side and the other -- the film's portrait of a wholly corrupt city is similar in many respects to Kurosawa's treatment of the same subject in Yojimbo.  To save Bernie, Tommy admits to his affair with Verna and, thereby, receives a severe beating from Leo.  Tommy has to switch sides and join Caspar's mob for a while.  As a test of loyalty, Tommy is supposed to kill Bernie who has been captured by the Italian gangster.  Tommy can't bring himself to commit the crime and lets Bernie loose.  Bernie is supposed to leave town so that Tommy won't be condemned by Caspar for not implementing the murder.  (People are taken into a woods to an intersection of paths called "Miller's Crossing" to be executed.)  Bernie shows up in town, however, and blackmails Tommy, demanding money from him to stay out of sight.  Tommy, who is a gambling addict, is deeply in debt to man named Lazar and he has no money at all.  (Lazar's thugs periodically threaten poor Tommy and administer a vicious beating to him as well.)  Ultimately, Tommy lures Bernie to an apartment where Caspar is also present.  Bernie kills Caspar and, then, Tommy murders Bernie.  Tommy has suffered innumerable beatings and torture because of Bernie, a man he was trying to protect and whom he ultimately kills himself.  Verna goes back to Leo and, in fact, asks the Irish mobster to marry her.  Tommy has lost everything, although he is able to pay back Lazar with greenbacks found on Caspar's corpse.  In the last scene, he sits alone in his shabby and dark apartment, placing yet another bet on a horse.  The film's morose conclusion is that everything Tommy has done is a failure:  he doesn't protect Bernie and, in fact, finds out that Bernie isn't worth saving anyway.  Bernie is an out-and-out vicious killer and he has to be put-down like a mad dog.  Verna betrays Tommy and goes back to her well-heeled mobster boyfriend.  Tommy gets nothing but beatings administered about every ten minutes throughout the film. 


The picture is exquisitely designed and shot.  (Barry Sonnenfeld is the D. P.)  The Coens' edit the film on the violence:  many shots begin with someone getting punched in the face or gut.  Some of the big set-pieces built to spectacular mayhem and, then, just as our blood-thirst is aroused and we want to see more slaughter, abruptly cut away.  A machine gun battle scored to "Danny Boy" is a highlight and the film has an absolutely beautiful theme -- it sounds like an Irish folk song -- played in lush orchestration, particularly when Verna enters the picture.  The music is so lovely and overwhelming that it somehow undercuts the squalor of the proceedings.  (It functions the way Morricone's themes work in Italian westerns and gangster movies). There is some horrific violence, but it doesn't overwhelm the film and everyone talks in a rat-a-tat delivery that simulates the characters cracking wise in a thirties' screwball comedy.  The diction is spectacular and poetic and, often, very funny.  At one point, when Verna meretriciously declares her affection for Tommy ("she's a grafter" everyone warns him), the hero replies:  "If I had thought that we were casting our feelings into words, I would have memorized 'The Song of Solomon'."  Tommy is a thinker, a reasonable man, and, in the corrupt world depicted in the film, he shows what passes for virtue.  The film's dispiriting, if realistic, theme is that virtue is never rewarded except by betrayal and beatings.  It's an alarming concept masterfully developed, but, ultimately, the film feels just slightly futile and schematic -- it's a little airless.  I'm aware, however, that this movie's reputation has grown with the years and it's undoubtedly a cynical masterpiece more akin to the stoic, existentialist crime pictures of Jean-Pierre Melville than to anything produced in Hollywood.