Miller's Crossing

What is the motivation of the main character?

At the start of Miller's Crossing, Tom thinks that everyone has clear motives. He tells his friend Leo "Friendship's got nothing to do with it… you do things for a reason." 

Tom is suicidal, but he's also too afraid to kill himself. He drinks (1st shot of the movie) and smokes more than anyone, maybe that will kill him, but he's too afraid to kill himself in a more direct way, so all of his actions are meant to provoke people who could kill him without hesitation. Repeatedly he makes bad bets, hoping that someday Lazarre, his bookie, will get fed up with him and kill him. He even tells one of Lazarre's men to "send someone by to break my legs. I won't squawk." He wants to be beaten, broken and killed. He could easily get money from Leo or Caspar to pay off Lazarre, but he doesn't. Also, Tom continually switches sides in a gang war, but no side kills him.

Throughout the movie, Tom gets beaten up, and not once does he try to defend himself. No one seems to hurt him either. The indestructibility of the film noir hero then becomes a curse Tom has to live with. No matter what he does, he cannot die. In gangster films, the main character usually dies at the end, not Tom. The Coen's put their signature dark twist to the gangster genre by giving us a gangster who wants to die all along, but survives the whole movie without even a scratch.

Tom is the best friend and consiglieri of Leo, the head of a criminal organization in an unnamed American city in 1929. From the beginning of the film, Tom tells Leo that he should let Caspar, the leader of the prominent italian mafia in the city, kill Bernie because he has been selling information on fixed fights. Caspar explains Bernie "is a horse of a different color ethics-wise. As in, he ain't got any." Miller's Crossing is about ethics. Tom's with Leo, and that means he can't be with anybody else. All he does is for the benefit Leo. At first Tom counsels Leo to avoid war. The whole movie can then be seen as a complicated game Tom plays for Leo. Leo and Tom meet to discuss what they should do.

There's a great POV shot of Tom looking at Leo. Leo is in a huge office, and he's visually trapped with lamps to his right and left, a chair in front of him, and one at his back. He also has his desk right behind him. In front of him, huge, barred windows. Leo has his back turned to Tom, looking out. And where one would imagine there to be a beautiful view (this being the great office of a powerful man) there is a big, forbidding, grey building. Leo is deprived of both freedom, and the simple pleasure of a nice view. As I said, this is Tom's POV shot. Tom, and everyone else in the movie recognize that he is the smartest man playing that he "knows all the angles." It is he who sees everything. He sees the terrible shape that his friend is in, and how he can get him out. The next thing he does is to put on his hat (his symbol of power and great intellect) and goes to betray his friend.

So he switches sides to Caspar, to see if he can destroy him from the inside. Slowly, he turns Caspar's crew against him, and they end up collapsing, leaving Leo the last standing after the war. 

Either of these two readings of the movie could be correct. Every time I see the movie, I come up with a different reason for why Tom does what he does. But part of the brilliance of the movie is that there is no clear answer because Tom himself, by the end of the film, does not know.

 Leo- "I guess you picked that fight with me just to tuck yourself in with Caspar"

Tom- "I don't know. Do you always know why you do things, Leo?"

Verdict- 4/4

Miller's Crossing (1990) 1h 55min.