THE BIG LEBOWSKI (Gramercy) Starring: Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore, Steve Buscemi, David Huddleston, Peter Stormare, Tara Reid, Philip Seymour Hoffman. Screenplay: Joel Coen and Ethan Coen. Producer: Ethan Coen. Director: Joel Coen. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, nudity, adult themes, drug use) Running Time: 115 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
God bless the Coen brothers, the film critic's best friends. While the grinding predictability of most American films challenges a writer to generate one more coherent thought than the film itself, Coen efforts like MILLER'S CROSSING, BARTON FINK and FARGO burst from the screen like doctoral theses waiting to be written, sending cinema scribes scrambling gleefully for a thesaurus. The bizarre supporting characters pinwheeling through their films could be glossed as metaphorical proto-fascists or subversions of traditional genre types; their apparently stream-of-conscious narratives could reveal clockwork structure. Oh, what happy hours could be spent fine tuning analyses fit for literary journals as we hurtled towards our deadlines.
I spent most of the car ride home from THE BIG LEBOWSKI -- and a fair chunk of time afterward -- spelunking for themes, tropes and symbols. The time frame of Gulf War-era 1991 was certainly meant to place the story squarely in the twilight of the Reagan/Bush go-go 1980s. The backbone of the plot, meanwhile, found inveterate 40-something layabout stoner Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski (Jeff Bridges) and his blustering Vietnam-vet pal Walter (John Goodman) mixed up in a convoluted kidnapping plot after the Dude is mistaken for _another_ Jeff Lebowski (David Huddleston), this one a wealthy philanthropist with a debt-ridden former porno star (Tara Reid) for a trophy wife. Mix in the "Big" Lebowski's feminist avant-garde artiste daughter Maude (Julianne Moore), ironic allusions to political correctness and a few swipes at the boot-straps rhetoric of the well-to-do, and clearly you have a satire of the ordinary Joe (or Jeff) unwittingly fighting to make the world safe for Republicanism. Right?
It was so much fun deconstructing THE BIG LEBOWSKI after the fact that I started trying to convince myself I had had as much fun watching it. The reason it's not more fun, despite a blissful singularity of vision which always keeps you watching, is that the Coens seem to take the same approach to making their films that we critics take to analyzing them. They're not stories as much as they are intellectual and aesthetic calistheics, films which make you work hard enough that you have to convince yourself you're getting something out of them. Joel and Ethan's encyclopedic knowledge of genre conventions and film expectations allow them to understand exactly when to yank the rug, but in THE BIG LEBOWSKI they fall into the same trap which hampered THE HUDSUCKER PROXY: they create so much distance from the characters that you're left with congratulating yourself because you got the joke.
If you're willing to surrender yourself to the Coens' characteristic oddball flourishes, you certainly won't walk away from THE BIG LEBOWSKI disgusted. Second-tier Coen fare is still better than most of what's out there; it's hard not to take some pleasure in a film which includes among its antagonists a trio of marmot-wielding nihilists, or clothes a meek bowling buddy named Donny (Steve Buscemi) in a succession of bowling shirts bearing every possible name _but_ Donny. Jeff Bridges also has great fun as The Dude, trying to wrap his fried brain around "clues" as he attempts to figure out exactly what's going on. It's just disappointing watching the Coens retreat into layers of irony once you've seen what happens in a film like FARGO when they're willing to humanize their phenomenal film-making talent. As undeniably amusing as many of THE BIG LEBOSWKI's oddball flourishes are, the film is almost nothing _but_ oddball flourishes, wandering along with a theme or two in tow. Bad news for those in search of accessible comedy; good news, as always, for those who work at finding oddball flourishes and well-disguised social commentary.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Dude drops: 6.
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