The relaxed Dude rides a roller coaster
The Big Lebowski A Film Review By Michael Redman Copyright 1998 By Michael Redman
***1/2 (out of ****)
The most surreal situations are ordinary everyday life as viewed by an outsider. When those observers are Joel and Ethan Coen, the surreal becomes bizarre. When the life is that of Jeff "The Dude" Leboswki, the bizarre falls over the edge into the world of "What'sgoingonaroundhere".
The marvelous sound of "The Stranger" (Sam Elliot)'s voice-over introduces the film. At least it does until he forgets what he was going to say and gives up. The Dude (Jeff Bridges) is described as the "laziest man in Los Angeles, possibly the world", although he's not so much slothful as he is relaxed.
Spending the last 30 years with a roach clip in one hand and a White Russian in the other, he doesn't have much of a life, but he's having a good time. When asked what he does for fun, he responds "bowl, drive around and the occasional acid flashback".
Lebowski's passion is bowling. When he's not rolling the ball down an alley towards a strike, things just happen to him. Arriving home one night, he's beaten by thugs attempting to collect money that his wife owes them. Even worse, they urinate on his rug. The problem is that The Dude doesn't have a wife. His assailants realize that their target is a different Lebowski when they glance around at his apartment. The "Big" Lebowski (David Huddleston) is a multi-millionaire and his Dudeness lives in two-room squalor.
The next day, our ragtag hero visits his namesake's mansion attempting compensation for his soaked rug. The carpet is important to him because it pulls the room together: not surprisingly since it's virtually the only object there. When he's denied any money, he picks up a replacement rug off the floor. On his way out, he runs into Lebowski's trophy babe wife Bunny (Tara Reid) who offers to perform a sexual act that, according to rumor, is one of Bill Clinton's favorites for a thousand bucks. The penniless Dude wisecracks that he's heading for the cash machine.
Later he gets an unexpected phone call enlisting his aid in being the bag man to deliver a ransom to Bunny's kidnappers. This begins the trademarked Coen brothers crimes-gone-wrong sequences. The kidnappers are impossibly inept. The Dude and his cronies are even worse. Every plan goes awry. You can almost see Lebowski's brain churning in slow motion as he tries to figure out the clues.
That's the story, but to tell the truth it doesn't much matter. There could be almost any plot and the film would be just as entertaining. The narrative only exists so we can watch the offbeat characters and the quirky predicaments they fall into. The Dude's bowling buddies Walter (John Goodman) and Donny (Steve Buscemi) look like people you'd see on the street but, like everything else in this film, they're not quite what they seem.
Walter is a vet as stuck in Vietnam as The Dude is in the sixties. Everything that happens reminds him of a situation in the Nam. When a fellow bowler crosses the foul line but won't admit it, Walter pulls a gun on him until he marks a zero on the score sheet. Donny gets precious few words in between Walter's screaming and The Dude's rambling. When he does, Walter shouts him down with horrendous albeit seemingly unintentional bowling puns. Donny is "out of his league" and doesn't "have a frame of reference".
The film is peppered with people for whom the term "character" would be an understatement. The Big Lebowski's daughter Maude, an avant-garde "vaginal" artist, paints while swinging naked in a leather apparatus like an S&M Mary Martin. The kidnappers are German techno nihilist bikers. Bunny Lebowski is a high school cheerleader turned porno star.
Most impressive is John Turturro in his far too small role as a Hispanic bowler. As the flamenco music swells, we see him putting on his lavender hose. The camera pans up to an all-purple skin-tight bowling outfit with "Jesus" (pronounced with a "J", not an "H") embroidered on the pocket. He addresses the lane with intense seriousness and one painted fingernail. His tongue slowly snakes out and lovingly licks the glowing bowling ball.
Bridges works The Dude as if he had been living him for decades and maybe he has. I can't think of anyone else who could have done a better job. Buscemi has a limited role, but he plays it perfectly. The more that I see John Goodman the more convinced I am that he's one of the treasures of our time. It's odd to think that most of the world knows him only as Roseanne Barr's television husband.
More like the Coen's "Raising Arizona" than their hit "Fargo", "The Big Lebowski" demands an open mind and even more open eyes. A mark of the Coen brothers is that even with all wonderful dream sequences and the broad slapstick physical comedy on the screen, much of the humor is subtle and easy to miss. There's so much going on that frequently it disappears before you can see it.
Walking out of the theater, I felt that the film had something important to say. On further examination, I wasn't sure exactly what it was. "If you meet Jesus at the bowling alley, it's not going to be what you expect"? "When the going gets weird, the weird go bowling"? Maybe there's no real message. Perhaps it's just a roller coaster ride through a hilarious world. Maybe that's enough.
(Michael Redman has written this column for 23 years and just realized that he was so taken with The Dude that he ran out of space to talk about "The Man In The Iron Mask" starring that favorite of 14-year-old girls of all ages. Redman@bvoice.com is the eaddress for estuff.)
[This appeared in the 3/19/98 "Bloomington Voice", Bloomington, Indiana. Michael Redman can be contacted at redman@bvoice.com]
-- mailto:redman@bvoice.com This week's film review at http://www.bvoice.com/ Film reviews archive at http://us.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Michael%20Redman
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