Miller's Crossing (1990)

This is the Coen film their admirers will go to the wall for, and the reason is Tom Reagan. He is a main character built entirely out of things he refuses to say. Gabriel Byrne plays him with almost no visible feeling, taking beatings, losing money, betraying people who trust him, and the film never once cuts inside to tell you why. You have to read him off what he does, and by the end you realise he has been protecting one person the whole time without admitting it to a soul.

Around him the Coens build the most beautiful looking film they had made to that point. Barry Sonnenfeld shoots the woods at Miller's Crossing like a cathedral, Carter Burwell writes the saddest score of his career, and the dialogue is a whole invented language of twist, grift, and what's the rumpus. It should be arch and cold. Instead the style is doing real work, because everyone in this movie is performing a role they picked, and the fancy talk is the costume.

It also has the single best sequence the Coens ever staged. Leo, an old man in a bathrobe, hears a noise downstairs, and what follows is two minutes of tommy gun and Danny Boy that is both genuinely thrilling and quietly absurd. Watch it and you understand the whole film. These men love the idea of themselves as gangsters, and the movie is enormously entertained by that, right up until it starts killing them.

The Coens wrote this while stuck, and then got so badly blocked partway through that they stopped and wrote Barton Fink instead, then came back and finished it. Knowing that, the film reads a little differently. It is a movie about a man running an elaborate plan he cannot explain, made by two people who had temporarily lost the thread of their own.

Nobody in the film ever tells the truth about what they want. Tom will not say he loves Leo. Verna will not say what she is doing. Bernie lies as a reflex, even when honesty would save him. Caspar makes speeches about ethics and friendship while ordering murders. The one exception is the Dane, who is direct and violent and correct about everything, and the film kills him for it.

Watch the structure and you notice Tom never actually fights anybody. He arranges. Every death in the movie happens because he said the right sentence to the right person at the right time, and he is standing somewhere else when it lands. That is his talent and also his sickness. He would rather run a scheme for two hours than have one honest conversation.

The last scene is Tom in the woods again, at a funeral, being offered exactly what he wanted by the man he saved. He turns it down and puts his hat back on. He has won and he is going to be alone, and the film's final gesture is to let him choose that without a word of justification.