On the Coens' Miller's Crossing (1990) and why it's the most underrated film in their catalog.

Miller's Crossing is a gangster film adapted from Dashiell Hammett's novel The Glass Key, which is itself an adaptation of the hard-boiled detective genre's conventions into a political machine story. The Coens use Hammett's source material to do something no other gangster film had done: place the psychological interiority of the genre at its center.

The protagonist Tom Reagan — played by Gabriel Byrne — is a man who controls his environment by understanding what everyone around him wants and using that understanding to anticipate and manipulate events. The film is told from inside this calculating consciousness, which means that you are always slightly uncertain whether what you're watching is what is actually happening or Tom's model of what is happening.

The visual language is extraordinary: the golden and rust-toned cinematography by Barry Sonnenfeld, the period-perfect production design, the Albert Finney hat. But what makes the film great rather than merely beautiful is the question at its center, which it never directly states: what does it cost a person to be as good at survival as Tom is?