You double cross once, where’s it all end
Miller’s Crossing (1990)
Welcome to another installment of my series on the films of the Coen Brothers. This is the fifth article in the series, following a general introduction, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Blood Simple and Raising Arizona.
As is so often the case with them, Miller’s Crossing contains a central image that the Coens deny contains any deeper meaning. In this case it’s the hat worn by protagonist Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne), a lieutenant and advisor to Leo O’Bannon (Albert Finney), the crime boss of an unspecified city during Prohibition. After the opening credits unfold the actors’ names over shots of a forest, the film’s title appears with the hat resting on the forest floor before a strong breeze lifts it up and blows it away.
Tom recounts these images later on, revealing them to be part of a dream he had once. “I was walking in the woods, I don’t know why. Wind came up and blew my hat off.” “And you chased it, right?” asks Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), who is in Tom’s bed despite officially being Leo’s girl. “You ran and ran, finally caught up to it. You picked it up, but it wasn’t a hat anymore—it had changed into something else, something wonderful.” “Nah, it stayed a hat,” Tom corrects her. “And I didn’t chase it. Nothing more foolish than a man chasing his hat.”
So there you go, the warning against interpretation is embedded in the film itself. Start extrapolating from one bit of information someone gives you and you’re bound to reach the wrong conclusion because you can never know the full contents of someone else’s mind. But here’s the thing. This position runs counter to everything about the way Tom conducts himself, both in business and his private life. In business because he’s the guy who “sees all the angles,” the thinker among the muscle, who can always find the right “play” by piecing together the motivations of every player in a scheme or dispute to fix the odds in his favor. And secondly, because he spends the entire film chasing his hat.
In a signal of how much work the audience will have to put in to keep up, the film begins mid-monologue. Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito) sits in a cavernous office expounding on friendship, character, and—he’s not embarrassed to use the word—ethics. Caspar makes a good part of his living off fixing boxing matches in concert with a bookie named Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro). But lately information has been leaking, the odds are sliding out of his favor until he’s betting on the short money. “It’s getting so a businessman can’t expect no return from a fixed fight,” he complains to Leo, who sits behind his desk listening unsympathetically. Caspar wants to kill Bernie for his treachery but Leo won’t allow it—Bernie pays for protection. Caspar leaves, furious, saying he’s gotten too big to have to follow Leo’s every order anymore. Tom, who’s listened to all this from the sidelines, doesn’t agree with Leo’s play. He doesn’t think Bernie is worth going to war with Caspar over and thinks he should hand him over to be killed.
Opening with Caspar’s speech immediately calls to mind the first moments of The Godfather and the mortician’s indelible declaration “I believe in America.” But if this an homage, it’s quite an ambivalent one. The scene is constructed to be destabilizing, to place us in a gangster picture just long enough to get our footing before pulling the rug out from under us. Polito looks and sounds very Italian so we assume he’s talking to his don, but when the camera flips we see not a Marlon Brando analogue but lily-white Irishman Albert Finney. Where the mortician’s speech is in complete earnest and we take it as such, Caspar’s monologue repeatedly calls attention to its own ridiculousness, the “honest business” of match fixing.
This scene signals a lot about Joel and Ethan’s intentions for the film. For one, it tells you to listen up—information is going to flow very quickly and if you miss it you’re screwed. More importantly it demonstrates that the film is going to inhabit all sorts of classic film tropes without being constrained by them. This world is grubbier and less noble than The Godfather but they can still develop themes and investigate the human soul, even as we laugh at its more foolish aspects. It’s a set of instructions for the rest of the movie to follow—Joel and Ethan are totally in earnest, and also in jest.
So Tom goes to play cards, blacks out, and wakes up without his hat—he lost it to Verna, Leo’s girlfriend and Bernie’s sister. He goes chasing after it (and her) and she ends up staying over at his place; it’s unclear how long they’ve been involved but this isn’t their first time. Leo arrives in the middle of the night, worried because he can’t find Verna despite having one of his guys tail her. He asks if Tom knows where she is. Tom says no, marking the first time he betrays someone’s trust in the film.
Tom finds himself pulled in numerous directions; everyone wants his loyalty. Verna asks him to put in a good word for Bernie with Leo; Bernie shows up and in his deliciously conniving manner offers to pay Tom’s gambling debts if he keeps him alive; Caspar asks for his allegiance, which Tom turns down. It’s amazing how quickly Tom’s intentions become obscure to us. He’s noncommittal to Bernie’s offer—is he really considering it? Or has he tentatively decided to protect Bernie because of his relationship with Verna (despite repeatedly accusing Verna of only being with Leo to buy Bernie’s protection)? His inability to be honest with Leo about Verna and with Verna about Bernie is warping his thinking and setting the stage for greater betrayals.
After a failed assassination attempt on Leo by Caspar, Tom tells Leo about his relationship with Verna. This doesn’t go well. Leo beats him bloody amid an army of goons before throwing his hat in his face, announcing “It’s the kiss-off. If I never see him again it will be soon enough.” It’s after this that he recounts his dream to Verna and reflects that there’s nothing more foolish than a man chasing his hat.
This is, I believe, when Tom’s perspective shifts. He realizes that up to this point he has been chasing his hat, distracted by personal concerns and constantly playing catch-up as events outraced him. He sees that he needs to take control of the situation if he’s to bring things to a conclusion. This shift is happening completely internally as he talks with Verna, who suggests they skip town. Instead he asks where Bernie is hiding, information he immediately takes to Caspar. The nonchalance with which he decides to sacrifice Bernie while talking to his own sister is chilling.
The scene in woods with Bernie is incredible. Turturro is electric as he babbles begging for his life, growing more panicked and distraught as he walks toward his death. There’s some subtle writing buried in his litany when he first says that he and Tom aren’t killers “not like those animals,” meaning Caspar’s other goons, which as his panic builds shifts to him pleading “I can’t die out here like an animal.” At the last moment Tom has a change of heart and spares Bernie and tells him to lay low before as far everyone else is concerned, he’s dead.
But Tom’s security is short lived. Caspar’s lieutenant, the terrifying Eddie Dane (J. E. Freeman), doesn’t trust Tom and has his own interests to protect. Bernie returns after realizing he now has leverage over Tom; he wants Caspar dead. After seeding distrust of the Dane with Caspar, Tom sets up his endgame. He provokes Bernie by demanding he bring $1000 to him at his place that night. He successfully convinces Caspar that it’s the Dane who’s been chiseling off his fixed fights this whole time, leading Caspar to kill the Dane. He then sends Caspar to his place ostensibly so he can kill the Dane’s partner in crime and lover Mink (Steve Buscemi), where he’s ambushed and killed by Bernie. Tom then kills Bernie in cold blood. He’s reunited with Leo who tells him it was “a smart play all around,” he just wishes Tom would have told him what he was up to. Leo asks Tom to come back to work for him but Tom declines, saying he didn’t ask for forgiveness and doesn’t want it.
Joel and Ethan were asked about the significance of Tom’s hat when they were interviewed by Positif in 1991. “Everybody asks us questions about the hat, and there isn’t any answer really. It’s not a symbol, it doesn’t have any particular meaning,” Joel said. “The hat doesn’t ‘represent’ anything, it’s just a hat blown by the wind,” said Ethan. “It’s an image that came to us, that we liked, and it just implanted itself. It’s a kind of practical guiding thread, but there’s no need to look for deep meanings,” added Joel. “Apparently, nobody wants to be satisfied with the movie, as if they absolutely need explanations beyond the images, the story itself,” said Ethan. “That always surprises me. But if you don’t comply, journalists get the impression that you’re hiding something from them.”
The more I think about Miller’s Crossing the more convinced I am by this anti-interpretive position. What Miller’s Crossing is about is the plot of Miller’s Crossing. Films are not books and they do not operate by the same rules. Just as Tom Reagan is one of the most inscrutable characters I’ve encountered in a long time, there is no way to extricate some pure reading of the film from the fact that we are on the outside looking in. Not only on the outside of the characters trying to fathom their hidden depths, but on the outside of the film itself, which is similarly withholding of its inner workings. All we can see is what it does, what elements of itself it externalizes in the workings of its plot.
If we think about the film this way we’re left with the brute fact that Tom kills Bernie at the end. It’s just not necessary; understanding why Tom does it is key to understanding his moral descent and to understanding the film more generally.
When I describe this movie as something purely external that consists only of its motions and outcomes and us as spectators to it, what I’m describing is sports. Miller’s Crossing takes the form of a boxing match between Leo and Caspar. Tom even tells Leo that he “can’t trade body blows” with Caspar. For the first half of the film, up until Tom decides to start taking a more active role in the proceedings, the match is playing out fair and square, unfixed. After the fiery, failed hit on Leo, things are getting messy. In the moment Tom decides to intervene I think he’s remembering something else Caspar said in the opening scene: “Now if you can't trust a fix, what can you trust? For a good return you gotta go bettin' on chance, and then you're back with anarchy. Right back inna jungle. On account of the breakdown of ethics. That's why ethics is important. It's the grease makes us get along, what separates us from the animals, beasts of burden, beasts of prey.” The power struggle between Leo and Caspar is descending into anarchy because their fight is being allowed to play out according to chance; it’s time the fix was in.
Caspar likes a fixed fight but Tom likes to bet for real. He bets on horses and hasn’t picked a winner in six weeks, putting him more than $1,500 in the hole with his bookie Lazarre (in 1930s money, remember). Leo offers to pay it off for him but Tom repeatedly declines: “I’ll square myself with Lazarre if you don’t mind.” As Tom finds the angles to fix “the fight” in Leo’s favor he also finds a way to fix it in his own. Between the money Caspar carries and the $1,000 he tells Bernie to show up with, the final bloodbath ends with Tom finally able to pay off his debt. He didn’t need to kill Bernie—Bernie would have given him that thousand just to put everything to bed. But if Bernie lived he would be the one person who knew the full extent of the way Tom set up the fix. Tom comes to agree with Caspar, that in Bernie’s hands that information would leak, just like Caspar’s fixes, which is far worse in Tom’s eyes than killing him.
Tom has to reject Leo and walk away from the game not because of his guilt over the many bodies his machinations piled up. It’s the shame of having abandoned honest gambling in favor of the fix.