Headlines

Ten Days Of The Coen Brothers: Day Six

Published

10 years ago

March 3, 2016

Admin

That’s A Strike

♦ With the release of Hail, Caesar! in the UK on 4 March, Tripwire kicks off a look at all of the Coen Brothers films released to date. Yesterday we took a look at their sixth film Fargo (1996) and now our editor-in-chief Joel Meadows takes a look at their seventh movie, The Big Lebowski (1998).

The Big Lebowski

Director: Joel Coen

Stars: Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore

Just two years after the release of Fargo, inspiration seemed to strike again with The Big Lebowski, a detective movie with a twist. The twist here was that its protagonist, Jeff Lebowski aka The Dude, was a burnt-out acid casualty living in Los Angeles who finds himself acting as an unofficial private dick after his namesake, Jeff Lebowski’s wife Bunny goes missing.

Jeff Bridges plays The Dude with a brilliant mix of loucheness and cool. If he were any more laid back, he’d be unconscious. Bridges is assisted by Coen Brothers regular John Goodman, who plays deranged Vietnam vet Walter Sobchak, with a hair trigger when it comes to the most trivial slights, while Steve Buscemi returns as Theodore Donald ‘Donny’ Kerabatsos, the third partner in their group. The trio bond over bowling, which is a touch that works rather well. With their usual canny eye for fantastic cameos, Philip Seymour Hoffman is the other Lebowski dogsbody Brandt, Julianne Moore plays the insane but strangely attractive Maude Lebowski, daughter of Jeff, and John Turturro is the flamboyantly camp hispanic bowler Jesus Quintana (not playing a Jewish character for a change here). Even the late Ben Gazzara is in tow, turning in a small part as purveyor of porn Jackie Treehorn.

The Big Lebowski is like Dashiel Hammett on acid with a couple of brilliantly realised dream sequences. It is possibly Jeff Bridges’ finest work too. It is testament to how great an actor he is that you actually begin to care about The Dude, who meanders through life without a care despite people pissing on his rug, threatening to cut his Johnson off and attacking him with a marmoset in his own bathtub. In a strange way, The Dude is actually an everyman character, albeit a rather perverse and weird one.

As well as the acting and the characters, The Big Lebowski is also blessed with some genuinely oddball and very amusing lines of dialogue. Goodman’s wigged out war casualty is the perfect foil for The Dude’s easygoing demeanour and Moore as the eccentric daughter of the wealthier Lebowski is pitch perfect here. The look of the film is also contemporary yet retro: returning cinematographer Roger Deakins brings the bizarre world of the Coens’ version of Los Angeles to life with rare pizazz and style, assisted by Carter Burwell’s score and T Bone Burnett’s choice of classic songs, especially from Creedence Clearwater Revival.

After Fargo, The Big Lebowski was a breath of marijuana-tinged fresh air. It is inventive, clever, sophisticated and likeable. As with Barton Fink, it showed just how skilled and imaginative the Coen Brothers could be, practitioners of modern movies who are capable of interweaving affectionate nods to classic Hollywood. After all, as we all know, The Dude Abides.

JOEL MEADOWS