Joel Cohen (1998)
It was an odd experience, seeing this famous film for the first time nearly twenty years after its release and its protagonist’s instant attainment of mythic status. Not disappointing exactly – I guess underlying antipathy towards the Coen brothers prevented a feeling of being let down. But Jeff Bridges’s performance as Jeffrey ‘the Dude’ Lebowski is strenuous and the movie as a whole so hit and miss that there were times when I was nearly wondering if this was the real The Big Lebowski. It was evidently different for lots of other people in NFT3: the seats in front of us were sometimes shaking with the force of their occupants’ laughter.
The prologue’s good. A song called ‘Tumbling Tumbleweeds’ plays; a determined clump of tumbleweed bounces around the landscape above Los Angeles; a deep Texan voice introduces himself as our storyteller – a meandering one, who acknowledges as much. Part of the pleasure of this introduction comes from a suspicion that he’s meandering because the Coens are having fun writing lines for this old-timer cowboy character (credited as ‘The Stranger’) and don’t want to stop. Another part of the pleasure is that the lines are spoken by Sam Elliott: the brief appearances that he and his moustache make later on are among the other high points. ‘Tumbling Tumbleweeds’ is the start of an enjoyably eclectic soundtrack. In most other respects, though, The Big Lebowski is just another disengaging Brothers Glib movie.
Watching it did produce an access of renewed gratitude for the recent Preston Sturges season at BFI. Sturges is often cited as an influence on the Coens and the two best performances in this film come from actors doing 1990s versions of types familiar from Sturges. John Goodman is the Dude’s bowling-alley buddy, Walter Sobchak, a Vietnam vet whose choleric single-mindedness makes things worse for the main character, à la William Demarest. Goodman’s mood swings and machine-gun delivery are rather electrifying. Philip Seymour Hoffman channels Franklin Pangborn. Hoffman plays Brandt, the vaguely prissy, uneasily ingratiating personal assistant to the bigger Lebowski (David Huddleston) – a rich man whose trophy wife (Tara Reid) is the sort-of centre of a convoluted kidnap plot. Hoffman does things like opening double doors with exaggerated gestural authority: Brandt wants to prove to himself he’s in control but his anxious mirthless laughter keeps giving him away. People repeatedly crash to the ground and that may sound like Sturges too. These aren’t really pratfalls, however: in The Big Lebowski a character usually hits the deck thanks to violence inflicted by another character.
The other member of the bowling team is Donny Kerabatsos, an affable dimwit nicely played by Steve Buscemi. As The Stranger says, it’s a pity that Donny doesn’t get out of the film alive. It’s some consolation that the sequence in which Walter and the Dude attempt to scatter his ashes supplies one of the simpler but more graceful visual gags. Julianne Moore is Maude, the feminist, avant-garde-performing-artist daughter of the millionaire Lebowski. Maude performs a kind of porno-gymnastics; Moore sustains a clipped English accent with all the ease of walking a tightrope (although she has a funny bit when she and David Thewlis, in a cameo as a camp scouse video artist, do a duet of excessive laughter). Maybe the contrast between roles and their interpreters is meant to be part of the comedy. Maude is superbly self-assured while Julianne Moore clings on to her accent for dear life. Jeff Bridges works very hard to be funny as the stoner-slacker Dude.
6 April 2016
