The Coen Project: Miller's Crossing

"Nobody knows anybody. Not that well." - Tom Regan

Millers' Crossing is the first Coen brothers film to feature characters with functioning frontal lobes. It takes place in a cuthroat world of gangsters, gun molls and bookies in a Prohibition-era urban jungle.  Dunderpates like H.I. McDonnough wouldn't last five minutes before being ground into hamburger. That's because this isn't really the Coen brothers world, it's Dashiell Hammet's, with the brothers using the stereotypes and plot mechanisms of books like The Glass Key and Red Harvest to riff on the genre.  With all the colorful dialogue and tough-talking gunsels, a lot of critics praised Miller's Crossing for its craft, but wrote it off as little more than an empty exercise in formalist tomfoolery.  That misses the fact that Miller's Crossing, in the characters of Tom Regan and Johnny Casper, offers contrasting approaches to conducting oneself in a lawless universe where wealth and guile are the only things that can keep you alive.  Tom Regan operates from the central conviction that the only person worth trusting is oneself, and so has built an ethic of radical self-centeredness.  His every decision is made based on maximizing his personal autonomy and avoiding any dangerous connection to other human beings.  When his boss, Leo O'Bannion offers to erase his mounting gambling debts with a single phone call, he refused "I'll pay me own way," he says, and he means it.  He serves Leo because he chooses to, not because he owes Leo anything.  Several times through the course of the movie, Tom is offered easy solutions to his problems; not just the gambling debts, but the continued existence of troublemaking bookie Bernie Birnbaum.  Each time, he refuses the out because it would undermine the his personal prerogatives.  In the most famous scene in the film, when Tom leads Bernie into the woods, having been ordered by Johnny Casper's goons, Frankie and Tic Tac, to finish the shmatte off himself, Tom saves Bernie's life because Bernie asks him to "look into" his heart.  What he finds there isn't compassion for Bernie, it's related to something else Bernie says to him while praying for his life: "they can't make us different people than we are. We're not muscle, Tom!"  And it's true. Tom is not a triggerman, and he cannot abide being forced to become one by a crazy dago like Johnny Casper.  And so, he risks his life to save Bernie, even though he gladly would have waited in the car while Frankie and Tic Tac killed him.  As Verna tells him, "I never met anyone who made being a son of a bitch such a point of pride."  In a world where trust can be as deadly than a loaded roscoe, the only armor is ferocious self-regard.  Compromising his sense of self or subsuming his will to anyone else will surely end him.  Tom's pigheadeness might get him killed, too, but he'll die on his own terms.  Johnny Casper, on the other hand, navigates the choppy waters of the underworld with a different sextant: "I'm talkin' about friendship. I'm talkin' about character. I'm talkin' about - hell. Leo, I ain't embarrassed to use the word - I'm talkin' about ethics."  For Johnny Casper, the only way to make sense of an unregulated marketplace of blood and thunder is to hold tight to an ethic of "above board" behavior: straightforward rackets, with no side dealing or doublecrosses because once you start double crossing, where does it end?  Casper figures that if he keeps to an ethic of honest thievery, so will those he deals with.  He passes up the chance to clip Tom after he fingers Bernie because such a double-cross would just invite more shady dealings.  In the end his naive belief that his personal integrity will protect him from the dishonesty of others gets him killed when he believes Tom over his right hand man, Eddie Dane.  He backs the wrong horse, because he's got nothing to go on but a gut feeling about which man to trust. It's a mistake Tom Regan would never make, because he operates on the assumption that no one is to be trusted.  It's a philosophy that leaves him alone at the end of the film, but grimly and defiantly alive.