Miller’s Crossing feels familiar but is something quite different. Unlike Martin Scorsese, who knew gangsters on the street and brought them into shocking life on the movie screen, the Coen Brothers discovered their dazzling, raucous and ultimately beautiful world at the movies and recognize that its ultimate fruition can only happen there. Despite its sharp, snazzy, underworld exterior – or perhaps because of it -- Miller’s Crossing is not, in fact about gangsters. Miller’s Crossing is a film about that elastic and all-pervasive phenomenon that blossomed in America in the twentieth century, popular culture.

It’s a movie about pop culture’s clichés and its archetypes, its poetry and aesthetics. Miller’s Crossing is its own complete world built out of pop ganster sensibilities, archetypes culled from the crime films of Paul Muni, Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, the stories of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and cartoons and comic books. You need never have seen a gangster movie in your life – let alone known a real gangster -- to feel connected to Miller’s Crossing. You only have to have lived in America in the last hundred years to get it. No one ever really said AWhat=s the rumpus?@ or ALet >em dangle@ or AI was in the neighborhood, feeling a bit daffy.@ Still it sounds as though it could be the slang of an earlier time. But not the time of the actual Roaring Twenties or the hard-scrabble Great Depression Thirties, but a time that took place in the rarefied air of the age of the birth of film, the age of Garbo and Bogart, Harlow and Gable. It’s not our reality, nor is it meant to be. This is a much-heightened reality, comic book characters with an epic heart and razor sharp wordplay. Miller’s Crossing is a movie about movies.

There is no questioning the Coen Brothers love of film. Joy pervades every frame of Miller’s Crossing. There is an immense satisfaction in their virtuosity, they are aware that they are good and it excites them. The viewer gets caught up by the excitement, dazzled by the skill and the panache in craft that is displayed. Because the love springs from a cultural history we share with the Coens we feel an immediate interconnectedness to the movie.

We don’t know the characters in Miller’s Crossing -- but we do. We already love them yet we are on the edge of our seats as we discover them. This is essential because the plot, as it often was in pulp fiction of an earlier day, is convoluted, almost messy. Essentially it is a turf war between two mob bosses in an unnamed city. The Irish mob is run by Leo (Albert Finney) and the Italian mob is run by Giovanni Gasparo aka Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito). The spark that sets off the tinderbox is a two-bit hustler named Bernie Bernbaum. Bernie survives by his wits, by knowing all the angles and playing them to the hilt. His machinations run him afoul of Johnny Caspar who feels he can’t have Bernie getting away with playing him for a sucker because it’s bad for business. Unfortunately, Bernie is protected by Leo because of Leo’s relationship with Bernie’s sister, the smoldering sexpot Verna. What Leo doesn’t know is that Verna may love him but she’s in love with Tom, Leo’s right hand man aaaaaaaaaaannnnndddd… never mind, you get the picture. Miller's Crossing is less about what happens as much as it is about how and why it happens. Character is paramount and Miller’s Crossing has some doozies.

The showpiece of the movie is John Turturro’s Bernie Bernbaum. Turturro is one of our best, most versatile actors and this is possibly his best performance captured on film. The tragedy of Bernie is that he doesn’t know what he’s going to do or why he does what he does any more than anyone else does. He’s a chiseler because that’s his nature. As it is for most of us, Bernie’s greatest talent is likewise his greatest weakness. Hustling is his means of survival but hustling is also what keeps putting his survival in question. You can feel Bernie’s history, why he is the way he is and why he makes the choices he makes in every facial expression, every gesture, every line reading Turturro gives. Bernie is the trickster, the coyote, Anansi, caught in a web of machinations of his own design. It’s a masterwork performance given by a consummate artist.

If Bernie is the showpiece of Miller’s Crossing it is his sister, Verna who gives the film its pumping heart. No actress in recent years matches the wordplay that Marcia Gay Harden displays here. Primarily of course, this has to do with the fact that no one ever writes great dialogue, no one enjoys repartee anymore. Having said that, when Harden gets a fastball on the outside corner she knows what to do with it B she knocks it out of the park. When, after an altercation in the women=s room of a night club gets physical, Verna leaves Tom (Gabriel Byrne) with the line AI bet you think you raised hell@-- and you can practically smell the smoke.It=s the best delivery since Lauren Bacall blew over Humphrey Bogart with a purr in To Have and to Have Not. Verna=s walk out of the room exudes not just femininity but something else, something more.

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