Miller’s Crossing: Marvelous Americans

Played with a desolate quietude by Gabriel Byrne, Tom Reagan, confidant to city fixer Leo O’Bannon (Albert Finney), always seems to have something eating at him. The movie’s opening scene is a typically blunt and funny depiction of the business these American gangsters have chosen. It is, as many great Coen scenes are, simultaneously dry and broad. A couple of ice cubes drop into a whiskey glass, depicting a familiar mode of social lubrication; a raspy offscreen voice says, “I’m talking about friendship, I’m talking about character, I’m talking about—hell, Leo, I’m not embarrassed to use the word—I’m talking about ethics.” About two-thirds of the way into this proclamation, the Coens cut to a medium close-up of the speaker, Johnny Caspar, played by Jon Polito, one of cinema’s greatest portrayers of double-talking sleazebags and a Coen rep player throughout the 1990s. The unctuousness he oozes from his pores and through every strand of his pencil mustache is the joke’s immaculate punch line.

But the cloud over Tom Reagan’s head, as he endorses Caspar’s notion to rub out a parasitical fixer known in this section only as Bernie, grounds the movie’s solemn mien to an extent that nothing, not Caspar’s ridiculousness or anything else, can fully displace it. Leo is a tough guy who knows how things work, but he’s not particularly sophisticated—Tom corrects his mispronunciation of joie de vivre—and he’s a little naive. We eventually learn that he’s blinded by love, or something like it. He’s smitten, dazzled, by a bombshell named Verna (Marcia Gay Harden, tough and tender in equally potent measure)—who’s also Bernie’s sister. It’s with this Verna that Tom himself is conducting a desultory, booze-mediated, self-loathing affair. This does not make Tom sentimental. Just the opposite. He’s all for getting rid of Bernie. “Think about what protecting Bernie gets us,” he counsels Leo. But Leo doesn’t think. He feels.

Tom feels too. But mostly what he feels, it seems, is a lip-biting disgust. With himself, with Verna, with the money he owes to an ever-unseen bookie (this movie’s God figure), with the entire world around him. Except Leo. One senses that it’s not so much that he likes Leo as that he envies him—for his ability to feel things other than, well, disgust.

Bernie Bernbaum, played with terrifying intensity by John Turturro, is an object—not even a subject, in the final analysis—to inspire disgust. He shows up twenty-five minutes into the movie and is immediately repellent. That Bernie is Jewish is not unremarked upon by the characters around him. He is referred to as a “sheenie” and a “Hebrew” again and again. But he’s no victim. Between his lightning-speed, improvisatory venality and his equally brisk line of patter—he’s one of those characters you know is lying because his mouth is moving (and if he’s not lying, he’s making awful threats)—Bernie doesn’t just seem irredeemable; he is irredeemable. This shudder-inducing character is not an anti-Semitic depiction as such—but his conception is definitely what one might call impious, and the discomfort it arouses is entirely deliberate. The liberal use of epithets describing Jewish and Irish characters tamps down the viewer’s inclination to romanticize or sentimentalize these characters—something they are prone to doing themselves, what with all the “Danny Boy” singing and such.

As it happens, Tom’s act of mercy with respect to Bernie is almost his ruin. At one point in the movie, Tom is said to be “straight as a corkscrew.” That also applies to the story the Coens craft here. The initial dynamic between Tom and Leo is derived from the relationship between Ned Beaumont and Paul Madvig in Hammett’s 1931 novel The Glass Key. After the break with Leo, precipitated by Tom’s bitter confession to him about the affair with Verna, the story comes to resemble that of Red Harvest, the 1929 Hammett book that pits an unnamed detective—“the Continental Op”—against two warring gangs in a town known as Poisonville. He manipulates them into wiping each other out.

But Tom’s not as cool a player as the Op. At every turn, just as the viewer thinks Tom has wised up and is handling things, a new wrinkle, or just a literal fist to the face, bollixes things up. The fact that he vomits on his way to the site where he didn’t shoot Bernie shows he didn’t count on the corpse that lies there in Bernie’s place, shot in the face to make him unidentifiable. The way lousy luck seems to follow Tom around every corner is something experienced by several Coen protagonists, including unlucky barber Ed Crane in The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) and A Serious Man’s Larry Gopnik. But the specificity of the misfortunes Tom faces, and the frustration they cause him, is a tie that practically binds Miller’s Crossing to Inside Llewyn Davis.

When all accounts and scores are settled, Leo expresses his gratitude to Tom. It was Tom’s “play,” his ostensible betrayal of Leo, that set the stage for the purge that ends at one very lonely funeral, where Tom is told to drop dead by the other mourner there with Leo.

Looking at Miller’s Crossing today, one is most impressed by its sheer density. The way the script adores idioms of the thirties criminal world: phrases and words like “let it drift,” “dangle,” “What’s the rumpus?,” “I’ll see where the twist flops,” “don’t smart me,” “take it on the heel and toe,” “jungled up,” and of course the immortal “I’m sick of getting the high hat.” At an angle off that idiom, there’s wisdom in the adages. The dry way that Johnny Caspar’s malevolent henchman the Dane (J. E. Freeman) says to Tom, “You ever notice how the snappy dialogue dries up once a guy starts soiling his union suit?” (A funereal variation on the great line “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter,” from The Maltese Falcon, both Hammett’s book and the movie.)

In an interview, cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld recalled that he and the Coens agreed that the movie should look “handsome.” That meant using long lenses and shallow focus. It meant magisterial New Orleans locations, streets and alleyways in which both gangsters and ghosts of gangsters walked. It meant the burnished feel of the interiors, down to the floorboards through which Leo sees telltale wisps of smoke in his bedroom. Such visual details enrich the movie’s great set pieces, which mix dread and slapstick with remarkable brio. Leo’s bravura response to his attempted assassination—not just the way he dispatches his would-be killers from underneath his bed, but his “just try me” rage as he runs into the street, tommy gun blazing. The slow, steady walk into the forest where Bernie will deal with a fate he’s not entirely sure he can wheedle his way out of. Tom’s exasperated invasion of a crowded ladies’ room to confront Verna. (The startled attendant is played by none other than Albert Finney in drag.) The movie’s sound, too, is handsome, imposing. Carter Burwell’s score, drawing on Irish themes, or Irish-sounding themes, evoking the old country of Tom and Leo, is orchestrated Aaron Copland–size. The movie’s silences are deep. The noise of a trolley car passing behind Tom as he is about to enter another building where he’s due for another date with destiny bears down like the chug of a 
mammoth locomotive.