John Turturro has made four great movies with the Coen brothers, playing both lead roles and scene-stealing ing characters in movies ranging from underrated gems to beloved cult classics. Turturro first collaborated with the Coens on their offbeat gangster saga Miller’s Crossing. For their next movie, Barton Fink, he graduated from a small part to the titular role. Turturro and the Coens have since worked on two more hilarious comedies, O Brother, Where Art Thou? (in which Turturro played one of the main trio).
The Coens demonstrated their versatility as storytellers right out of the gate with their first two movies, grisly neo-noir thriller Blood Simple and wacky slapstick comedy Raising Arizona. Turturro has appeared in both low-budget independent films like Five Corners and Box of Moonlight and big-budget blockbusters like Transformers and The Batman. He’s developed long-running working relationships with such iconic Hollywood talent as Spike Lee and Adam Sandler. Some of Turturro’s movies with the Coens have been praised as one of the best in their genre, while others have been less well-received.
4 O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
Easily the wackiest adaptation of Homer’s epic Greek poem The Odyssey, O Brother, Where Art Thou? takes one of the oldest stories ever told and transplants it into the Deep South in the 1930s. Turturro stars alongside George Clooney and Tim Blake Nelson as a trio of escaped convicts in search of a hidden cache of buried treasure that’s about to be lost forever when the area is flooded to create a lake. Clooney’s Ulysses Everett McGill stands in for Odysseus, while Turturro’s Pete and Nelson’s Delmar correspond with Odysseus’ soldiers who him on his journey from Troy to Ithaca.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? wasn’t as universally praised as some of the Coens’ other movies, but it was warmly received by both critics and audiences, with a 79% score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 7.7 rating on IMDb. Full of cartoonish set-pieces and bird-brained characters, O Brother, Where Art Thou? is one of the Coens’ silliest movies. It’s undoubtedly a great comedy, with some hilarious characters ing Ulysses and his buddies along the way, but it’s not as profound or labyrinthine as the other films that Turturro has made with the Coens.
3 Barton Fink (1991)
After Turturro’s ing turn in Miller’s Crossing, the Coen brothers promoted him to lead role in their next movie. Turturro plays the title character in Barton Fink, a neurotic up-and-coming New York playwright in the 1940s who relocates to Los Angeles to write a wrestling movie and finds himself wrestling between high art and low art. Although it was a box office bomb (via The Numbers), Barton Fink was a hit with critics, scoring 89% on Rotten Tomatoes and 7.6 on IMDb. It swept the Cannes Film Festival awards, winning Best Director for the Coens, Best Actor for Turturro, and the prestigious Palme d’Or.
Barton Fink defies genre classification. This curious, self-aware story about storytelling itself is utterly unique. It could be described as a film noir, a buddy comedy, and even a horror movie, but the truth is that it’s something completely new that exists somewhere between all those genres. Barton’s hotel is as creepy as the Overlook from The Shining, his Hollywood superiors are as satirically sardonic as Ari Gold from Entourage, and the movie ends with a hallway being consumed by the fires of hell. Barton Fink is an intellectually challenging movie; it takes a long time for viewers to unpack what they’ve just seen.
2 The Big Lebowski (1998)
The Coens gave Turturro a smaller part than usual in The Big Lebowski, but he still manages to shine. Although it bombed at the box office (The Numbers) and received mixed reviews, The Big Lebowski has since become a beloved classic. The Big Lebowski is now a cornerstone of cult cinema with an impressive 79% Rotten Tomatoes score and an 8.1 IMDb rating earning it a spot on the Top 250 list. Like Barton Fink, the movie exists in a genre of its own; The Big Lebowski is a “stoner noir,” combining the devilishly complex mystery plotting of a film noir with the laidback laughs of a stoner comedy.
Jeff Bridges stars as Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski, a slacker and avid bowler who gets unwittingly swept up in a kidnapping plot thanks to a classic case of mistaken identity. The Big Lebowski follows an episodic plot typical of a twisty film noir, and each episode introduces audiences to another subversively absurd character, from Julianne Moore as a sexually liberated femme fatale to Peter Stormare as an adult film star-turned-nihilist. Turturro gives one of the film’s many scene-stealing ing turns as Jesus Quintana, a rival bowler and “pederast” who refers to himself in the third person to deliver one of The Big Lebowski’s best quotes: “Nobody f***s with the Jesus!”
Not only is The Big Lebowski a breezy hangout comedy with relaxed energy and lots of laughs, but it’s also a razor-sharp deconstruction of Raymond Chandler’s genre-defining brand of hard-boiled crime stories. It sets up a convoluted conflict, constantly throwing in new twists and developments. As suspicious characters come and go, “new s***” comes to light, and a severed toe arrives in the mail, the detective story ultimately becomes meaningless and the Dude is left without any closure before his pal Walter simply tells him, “Let’s go bowling.” Turturro went on to write, direct, and star in a spinoff film centered on Jesus, The Jesus Rolls, though it bombed critically.
1 Miller's Crossing (1990)
With a near-perfect approval rating of 93%, Miller’s Crossing is one of the Coen brothers’ highest-rated films on Rotten Tomatoes, and it has a similarly irable IMDb score of 7.7. It’s a delightfully quirky take on the gangster genre exhibiting the Coens’ unmistakable idiosyncratic voice. Miller’s Crossing is just as poignant and introspective and smartly constructed as the mother of all mob movies, The Godfather, but with the Coens’ uniquely offbeat sense of humor. Gabriel Byrne stars as mob enforcer Tom Reagan, who’s caught in a power struggle between two rival gangs in the Prohibition era.
Byrne ably carries the film, but Miller’s Crossing is full of powerful performances, particularly from Albert Finney as badass mafia boss Leo O’Bannon and Turturro as double-crossing bookie Bernie Bernbaum. Turturro is responsible for one of Miller’s Crossing’s most memorable scenes with his gut-wrenching “Look into your heart!” monologue when he’s taken out into the woods to be executed by Tom and desperately begs for his life. After Tom reluctantly lets him live on the condition that he leave town and never return, Bernie instantly comes back to town to blackmail the hitman who spared his life. Turturro conveys this audacious betrayal with the perfect knowing grin.
Miller’s Crossing is more nuanced than the average gangster movie, and it plays around with the expectations of the genre. Its violence is played for slapstick laughs to point out the absurdity and immaturity of solving problems with punching. The Coens included plenty of thought-provoking symbolism: the characters’ hats are used as a subtle way of highlighting the importance of distinguishing between right and wrong, even amid rampant corruption. Miller’s Crossing is the quintessential Coen brothers movie, combining the off-the-wall hilarity of Raising Arizona and A Serious Man with the bleak meditations on violence of Fargo and No Country for Old Men, and John Turturro is perfect in the role.
