Miller’s Crossing, 1990

character

Tom Reagan

production

Circle Films/Twentieth Century Fox, 1990
Directed by Joel Coen
Screenplay by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
Cinematography by Barry Sonnenfeld

taglines

Nothing is what it seems at Miller’s Crossing.

Up is down, black is white, and nothing is what it seems.

synopsis

Joel and Ethan Coen’s third collaboration, the gangster film Miller’s Crossing, stars Gabriel Byrne as Tom Reagan, the right-hand man of big-city Irish mob boss Leo (Albert Finney). The film opens with Italian mobster Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito) and his second in command Eddie Dane (J.E. Freeman) informing Leo and Tom that they are going to kill bookie Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro) because he has been revealing Caspar’s fixed fights to other gamblers. Leo informs Caspar that Bernie pays for protection and is not to be touched. After the Italians leave in a huff, Tom informs Leo that he should give up Bernie. Tom and Leo are both involved with Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), Bernie’s sister. After a failed hit on Leo starts a full-scale mob war, Tom reveals to Leo the truth about his relationship with Verna. This leads to a falling-out between the pair. Tom goes to work for Caspar, but in truth, he is still loyal to Leo. Tom figures out how to manipulate all of the situations so that Leo survives, but this may cost Tom his relationship with Verna. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide

trailers

production stills

quotes

Eddie Dane: How’d you get the fat lip?
Tom Reagan: Old war wound. Acts up around morons.

Tom Reagan: Nobody knows anybody. Not that well.

Tom Reagan: Tell Leo he’s not God on the throne, he’s just a cheap political boss with more hair tonic than brains.

Tom Reagan: Think about what protecting Bernie gets us. Think about what offending Caspar loses us.
Leo: Oh, come on, Tommy. You know I don’t like to think.
Tom Reagan: Yeah. Well, think about whether you should start.

Verna: Shouldn’t you be doing your job?
Tom Reagan: Intimidating helpless women is my job.
Verna: Then go find one, and intimidate her.

Verna: That’s not why you came, either.
Tom: Tell me why I came.
Verna: [seductively] The oldest reason there is.
Tom: There are friendlier places to drink.

Verna: Why don’t we just pick up and leave town? There’s nothing keeping you here. I know there’s nothing keeping me.
Tom: What about Bernie?
Verna: He could go with us.
Tom: You, me and Bernie; where would we go, Verna? Niagara Falls?

Tom and Verna, discussing hats:
Verna: What´re you chewin´over?
Tom Reagan: Dream I had once. I was walkin’ in the woods, I don’t know why. Wind came up and blew me hat off.
Verna: And you chased it, right? You ran and ran, finally caught up to it and you picked it up. But it wasn’t a hat anymore and it changed into something else, something wonderful.
Tom: No, it stayed a hat and no, I didn’t chase it. Nothing more foolish than a man chasin’ his hat.
Verna: Maybe that’s why I like you, Tom. I’ve never met anyone who made being a son of a bitch such a point of pride.

Bernie: Look in your heart! Look in your heart!
Tom Reagan: What heart?

screencaps

More screencaps byDaniela are in the Gallery.

gabriel byrne on “miller’s crossing”

At the Picture House, June 12, 2010

reviews

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times

(Mr. Ebert does not mention Gabriel Byrne at all in his review and he is not that impressed with the film in general, either…)

“Miller’s Crossing” comes from two traditions that sometimes overlap, the gangster movie of the 1930s and the film noir of the 1940s. It finds its characters in the first and its visual style in the second, but the visuals lack a certain stylish tackiness that film noir sometimes had. They’re in good taste. The plot is as simple as an old gangster movie, but it takes us a long time to figure that out, because the first half hour of the film involves the characters in complicated dialogue where they talk about a lot of people we haven’t met, and refer to a lot of possibilities we don’t understand. It’s the kind of movie you have to figure out in hindsight.

Richard Corliss,Time Magazine

Like Red Harvest [Dashiell Hammett's novel, upon which Miller's Crossing is said to be based], but unlike most movies, Miller’s Crossing has a good novel’s narrative density. The film finds a dozen angles in the battle between Leo O’Bannion (Albert Finney), the Irishman who has run the town for years, and Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito), the volatile, flirtatious Italian who is itching to seize control. Their bone of contention is Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro), a gambler too greedy to live long but too cunning to stay dead. His sister Verna (Marcia Gay Harden) has stolen Leo’s heart and is ever ready to fence it. Nice crowd. Shuttling among them, wooed and wounded by them all, is Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne), an existential hero with a black Irish soul. We spend most of the movie racing after Tom’s mind, trying to figure what devious plan it will spin next.

Rita Kempley, The Washington Post

In the leading role of Tom, Byrne is torn — make that shredded — between his fedora-covered head and his scabbed-over heart. The hat, symbolic of Tom’s quandary, leads a life of its own, blowing off in the wind, then magically reappearing on the stair. Like many a Hammett hero, Tom would keep everything under his hat, if only he could keep it on his handsome head. And it’s no accident that the movie’s moll, Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), wins it from him in a game of chance. Love’s a gamble and Tom, in debt to the local loan shark, has a record as a loser…”Miller’s Crossing” is as disturbing and densely beautiful as its opening image, a lofty forest that dwarfs the gangsters as they laugh over their kill. There is an uncompromising magic about this primeval setting, until it comes over you like a wolf’s shadow that this is where the brutal truly belong.

Vincent Canby, The New York Times

”Miller’s Crossing” is a movie of random effects and little accumulative impact. Though both Mr. Byrne and Mr. Finney (who looks very fit these days) give legitimate performances, they are not charismatic screen figures here, nor do they even have the schlocky charm of B-picture actors. They are ciphers. So too is Miss Harden, who gives the impression of being tastefully dolled up for a 1920′s masquerade party.

Overview at The New York Times

Comments from a reader: This movie is my favorite of all Coen Brothers movies. I’ve watched it at least five times and it gets better each time. The atmosphere, the characters, the dialogue are unique and compelling. In fact, it is one of the most quotable movies around. The film also delves into the tangled questions of who is good, who is bad, what are ethics and who has has them. And I love the crosses, double-crosses, angles and contradictions that appear throughout the film. I hope the NYT critics will revisit this one and give it another review.

Film 4

Up there with the Coen brothers’ finest work. Miller’s Crossing is a lush recreation of the period gangster film, invigorated by some fine performances, a devilish plot and sprinkled with some macabre touches that could only come from the minds of Joel and Ethan Coen.

Empire Magazine

The casting is inch perfect. Finney makes the charismatic Leo his own, despite having stepped in at the last possible moment when original choice Sterling Hayden died [Actually, the Coen's first choice for the role of Leo was Trey Wilson, who died two days before filming was to begin]. Harden, atypically attractive with voluminously mad Dorothy Parker hair, is all twitchy sexuality and pout. While the regular Coen troupe weave their rabbit-mouthed magic (Turturro, Buscemi, Polito — look out, too, for cameos from Sam Raimi and Frances McDormand) as a bunch of slickly attired, self-serving double-crossers. Tom is the converse, his motives are loyalty and friendship — even trust on some deeply buried level, only his method is betrayal. A sack of bitter wisecracks, fuelled by sour bourbon and ever-present smokes, he plays all ends against the middle with rubs of Bogart in his sharp tongue and street loner persona. It’s Byrne’s finest moment, although he struggled with it — those damned elusive brothers. Tom paradoxically gives the movie heart. Fluttering evasively around the edges of Miller’s Crossing is a twisted form of devotion, even love.

Rotten Tomatoes

Miller’s Crossing receives a 90% positive rating.

posters

articles

Excerpt from Gabriel Byrne’s entry in David Thomson’s The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, Expanded and Updated, published in 2004:

“Somehow, I always have the urge to reach out and tickle Gabriel Byrne. I think it’s because his uncommon aura of gloom and sadness seems so complete it likely masks a teaser or a practical joker. But looking the way he does, how is he ever going to get cast in a comedy–especially when films incline so naturally towards ruined priests, morose gangsters, and depressed terrorists? And, truth to tell, he did the poker-faced, life-is-short routine so superbly in “Miller’s Crossing”(1990, Joel and Ethan Coen) that he might as well laugh sometimes. That’s not just his best film, it’s one of the best performances in American film–the whole melancholy routine.”

Helen Dudar, The New York Times: “Gabriel Byrne Bound for Miller’s Crossing”

A while back, Mr. Byrne emerged from a viewing of the Coen brothers’ ”Raising Arizona” thinking, now, that’s movie making, and he said to himself, ”I’d like to work with those guys.” He never learned whether the Coens had been similarly inspired by any of his performances; he was a casting director’s recommendation and the first of a number of actors who read for the part. The brothers, he later learned, were initially dubious because they saw the character of Tom Regan as wholly American. Mr. Byrne, who was dazzled by the music of the dialogue, found the language echt Irish. It was, he recalls, like slipping into an overcoat that was a perfect fit.

All-TIME 100 Movies at Time Magazine

In 2005, Time magazine chose Miller’s Crossing as one of the 100 greatest films made since the inception of the periodical. Time critic Richard Corliss said of it:

But in Miller’s Crossing (a reworking of the social chicanery in Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red Harvest), the antagonists are smart and out-smarter. Albert Finney runs a corrupt town in the 1920s, Gabriel Byrne is a brainy sort sometimes allied with Finney, and a stellar lineup of eccentrics (John Turturro, Steve Buscemi, Jon Polito) fills in the background of this marvelous, and pretty serious, fresco. It’s noir with a touch so light, the film seems to float on the breeze like the Frisbee of a fedora sailing through the forest.