Michael Lerner made a career of men who were certain: studio heads, mayors and mobsters who talked fast and never checked their facts. Jack Lipnick in Barton Fink is the best of them; most of the rest gave him the same man with less to do.
Fi1m perspective
Jack Lipnick runs a studio and has never had a reason to doubt his own judgement. Michael Lerner plays him at speed and at volume, so that by the time one of his sentences has finished everyone in the office has already agreed with it, and the Coens barely need to underline the absurdity because he has done it for them. The glasses were modelled on Louis B. Mayer's, and that is the method in short: find the real man behind the type and wear him. We laughed at Lipnick in Barton Fink (1991) and were never entirely sure it was safe to, because the talk comes so fast and so warmly that there is no gap in it to check whether he is joking. It is his best-known performance and, on the evidence we have, his best.
He had been working for two decades before it. After a start on stage in San Francisco he moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s and worked steadily in television and in supporting film parts, and the roles that got him noticed were the ones the casting would keep returning to: Arnold Rothstein, the gambler who fixed the 1919 World Series, in John Sayles's Eight Men Out (1988), and the gangster Bugsy Calhoune in Harlem Nights (1989). Studio heads, crime bosses, politicians, publishers. Men with money and a reason to be listened to. He liked playing real people and said so, because it let him become someone for a while, and the historical parts are where the research shows.
After Lipnick the offers were largely for the same man in worse films. Mayor Ebert in Roland Emmerich's Godzilla (1998) is a joke about an American television critic, and as we said in our review the film runs it several times in case anyone missed it; Lerner is game, but there is no character under the gag to play. Fulton Greenway, the publisher in Elf (2003), and Senator Brickman in X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) are the type again with a fresh title. He was candid about this himself, describing the blockbuster parts as good parts rather than great acting roles, and he said that nobody offered him the sympathetic romantic lead he wanted. The one lead he did get, as a hypnotised killer in Anguish (1987), he named as a personal favourite.
What made him worth having, even when he was least used, was the layer of charm he put under the bullying. Lipnick is a monster, but he is pleased to see you, and Lerner never plays the monster and the host as two separate settings. The Coens saw it and brought him back for a small part in A Serious Man (2009). Most directors saw only the volume.
Start with Barton Fink, then Eight Men Out. Save Godzilla for an evening when you want to watch a good actor wait for a script to give him something to do.
Biography
Michael Lerner was an American actor. Born in Brooklyn, New York, on 22 June 1941, he studied drama at Brooklyn College before receiving a Fulbright Scholarship to train at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He later worked with the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.
Lerner appeared in numerous film and television roles over six decades. He played Jack Lipnick in the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink (1991), for which he received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor. Other credits include Arnold Rothstein in Eight Men Out (1988), Mayor Ebert in Godzilla (1998), Fulton in Elf (2003) and Senator Brickman in X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014). He also appeared in A Serious Man (2009) and episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
His brother Ken Lerner and nephew Sam Lerner are also actors.
