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 [show more]
Miller's Crossing, the third and finest film from the esteemed Coen Brothers, is one of the finest American films ever made. The picture finds the duo at their most imaginative, yet, strangely, also their most restrained. The Coens' have always been bravura stylists, but their imagination is manifested in a more somber and moody fashion this time around--which makes the abrupt stylistic flourishes in a couple of key moments all the more overwhelming.
The plot is far too labryinthine to do justice in the alotted space, but it centers around a tortured soul whose torn between his love for a woman and his loyalty to his friend. Gabriel Byrne gives easily his greatest performance as Tom Reagan, the wiseass right-hand-man to Alber Finney's cartoonish crime boss. Reagan is the Coens' answer to Humphrey Bogart, but they manage to infuse the character with more remorse, self-loathing, and utter loneliness than any Bogart character that comes to mind. They take the typical Bogartian archetype and stretch the key dynamics of the character one step farther.
The film manages to squeeze 20 years worth of Hollywood history, from the Gangster films of the 30's to the Noirs of the 40's, into it's 105 minutes, but one never forgets that we're in the hands of an individual and unique vision. There are certain moments where a scene is punctuated by some sort of ambient breath, like someone lightly blowing over the top of a beer bottle, that suggests the authors of the picture omnipresent during their masterpiece. Miller's Crossing sways violently from comedy to drama, satire to homage, thriller to romance, while maintaining a steady tone throughout. The Coens' manage to allow all of their thematic motifs, dramatic goings-on, and heart-thumping style to coalesce into a singlular voice that demands to be heard.
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Two men, Leo and Tom belong to the same local mob. When they both happen to fall in love with the same woman their friendship is severed and Tom joins up with Leo's enemy. A gang war begins to rip the city apart...
A typically oddball take on the gangster movie from cult directors the Coen brothers. Crime boss Leo (Albert Finney) is asked to kill a chiseler who's moving in on someone else's action, only to discover that his target is the brother of his girlfriend. However, his girlfriend is two-timing Leo with his gambler friend Tom (Gabriel Byrne), who is also ordered to kill the chiseler after he joins a rival faction.
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