REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (15)

By: Ramona Lyons
May 18, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of “offbeat” movies from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

MILLER’S CROSSING | THE COEN BROTHERS | 1990

A sly Prohibition-era neo-noir, Miller’s Crossing (1990) is full of “plays” and crosses and double crosses, a rat’s maze run by rival mob bosses Leo and Johnny Caspar, intent on keeping control of every racket they can, with the local Police Commissioner and Mayor in their back pocket to boot. These men are clean archetypes — Leo, a mob boss with mad Tommy Gun skills but a soft heart, and Johnny Caspar, an upstart with an inferiority complex and deadly temper. Alongside rides Tom Reagan, cool-headed consigliere to Leo, and Verna, a hard-bitten moll who wields her body like a knife.

In addition to being visually moody and stylish, the film’s crackling dialogue sweeps you into the banter of the age. In the land of “twists” and offers to get lost or “dangle,” characters ask, “What’s the rumpus?” and expect a wise-cracking answer that reveals nothing. There’s also a plethora of colorful ethnic slurs throughout the film that need not be repeated here.

It creates a mesmerizing, dark gangster vibe and very fun ride, but for the sad emptiness at the very heart of the film, propelling its impact exponentially beyond its nostalgic homage to the many snappy gangster and noir films before it.

Much of this rests with Tom Reagan, our hapless sherpa through the wilds of Gangsterland. Though Leo takes Tom’s advice with a grain of salt, Tom has a place at the table that puts his formidably strategic mind to the test. The opposite of “muscle,” he weaves through alliances and betrayals, but not without his knocks, demonstrating the benefits and drawbacks of his brains-over-brawn approach to survival.

But we soon discover that in a world where loyalty and a personal code are all that divides humans from criminal “animals,” Tom has lived in the grey for too long, unable to commit and hold to any side other than the smart “play” at the time. Tom is a lost soul, an existential nowhere man buffeted by the winds of change like a sad fedora in the breeze.

Yes, a fedora. Tom is often losing and finding his hat. A floating signifier that overall cues a man’s dignity and identity, the hat is what one holds on to when things go south. In the parlance of the film, nothing is more ridiculous than a man chasing his hat, words that’s come out of Tom’s mouth, but have yet to sink into his being. Instead, Tom dreams of his hat floating away down the road of Miller’s Crossing, the great gangster Nowhere where inconvenient bodies disappear, the trees silent witness to his folly, a hat being just a hat in the end, just something empty to hold.

Tom lives in the shadowlands of a closed-off heart, the easier path all-in-all. At the movie’s finale, he gazes longingly at Leo’s back as it disappears into the distance — and can do nothing but adjust his hat. He hides behind the brim, but it can’t shade the loss in his eyes.

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REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (15)

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