The Big Lebowski
Joel Coen, USA, 1998, 116 mins
Review by Gerald Houghton (1997)
Movies from the Coen brothers are designed to sabotage reviewers. Even if you like them. Love them, even - a state of affairs not rare in the rarefied world the cine-sibs inhabit. By attempting to explain everything that's great about one of their complex, literate, hysterical pictures, you end up with a simple list of who said what to who, how that camera moved just so, and a huge flowchart of the events so lovingly drawn on screen.
Have I excused myself? Because films by this pair really are critic-proof. They defy analysis because the worlds they invest in are so hermetic. Like David Lynch (in many ways, the brothers' evil twin) says, if you properly define the rules in the beginning, you can do just about anything. And they have. Like Elmore Leonard books (one of which they just bought, incidentally), you end up only able to define these films in terms of each other. And by that token, this is up there somewhere near the top, sharing a podium with the scary-funny Barton Fink and the funny-funny Miller's Crossing.
But in the spirit of Lynch's adventure - nothing ventured, nothing gained - let's set some ground rules and try and bag us a Big Lebowski:
1. The Review (Part 1): This is no Fargo; this is hardcore Coens. This is no compromises, Lawrence of Arabia, 'No prisoners!' Coens. If Fargo made concessions to a wider audience then The Big Lebowski is the club bouncer checking if your name's down at the door. It's ambitious, disjointed, very very funny, and, for the uninitiated, utterly impenetrable.
2. The Plot (Part 1): Los Angeles. The heavily bearded Jeff Bridges is Jeff 'The Dude' Lebowski ('That, or Duder. His Dudeness. Or El Duderino, if, you know, you're not into the whole brevity thing'), a 70s activist gone to seed as a committed drinker and bowler. We meet him gargling down his own toilet bowl after being jumped by two hoods who finger him (wrongly) as a millionaire by the name of Lebowski. By way of an apology they piss on his rug. The Dude visits his wheelchair-bound namesake (David Huddleston) to seek compensation, and soon finds himself embroiled in delivering the ransom after Mrs Lebowski goes and gets herself kidnapped by a trio of German synth-popsters turned porno-nihilists.
3. The Cast: Bridges is terrific in the lead, his heavy frame, stoop shoulders and clumsy gait making us think of his dazzling turn in Passer's 1981 thriller, Cutter's Way. His combustible best buddy, security expert and Nam vet Walter, is taken by John Goodman with real gusto. Walter is a gun-toting madman, but at least he's a gun-toting madman on The Dude's side. He's the violent father to The Dude's mother, with the dim, slightly pathetic Donny (a surprisingly sedate Steve Buscemi) as their dim, slightly pathetic child.
Against them are ranged a whole panoply of halfwits, thrill-seekers and time-servers: 'A parallel universe of complete jerk-offs.' Sam Elliott is our cowboy narrator. Boogie Nights veterans Philip Seymour Hoffman and Julianne Moore do star turns as The Big Lebowski's obsequious assistant and an avant garde 'vaginal artist' respectively. Ben Gazzara offers a brief but creepy essay of a pornographer, while Britain's David Thewlis pops briefly up as bald art supremo Knox Harrington. And John Turturro dons a hairnet and a figure-hugging purple pantsuit for Jesus - a lascivious kiddie-fiddling bowler with attitude: 'Nobody fucks with the Jesus.' Truly once-seen never-forgotten.
4. The Plot (Part 2): Some heavy shit goes down.
5. The Philosophy (Part 1): 'I bowl. I drive around. I enjoy the occasional acid flashback.'
6. The Bit That Sounds Clever: The Big Lebowski is a lot of things. It's Raymond Chandler made on an even longer piece of elastic than Altman's classic paean to Los Angeles, The Long Goodbye. The plot exists solely to facilitate meetings between disparate characters, to allow us the privilege of watching them bounce gleefully off of one another. Think of an extra-labyrinthine, pothead Big Sleep; that title is as much an accident as putting Lebowski in a wheelchair. Joel directs, pushing his usual flair to its 'nearly-surreal' limits, while bro Ethan produces and co-writes. Truly, ladies and gentlemen, a post-modern Powell and Pressburger. Oh, and there are some big musical numbers too.
7. The Philosophy (Part 2): Zen and The Art of Bowling.
8. The Bottom Line: It's got an iron lung in it. And as John Waters, the Coens and anyone who grew up in the 70s knows, iron lungs are inherently funny.