Coen Bros: The Big Lebowski More “Big” than “Lebowski”
…And I’m not even totally sure what that’s supposed to mean
The Big Lebowski
Director: Joel Coen
Released: March 6, 1998
**** 4/5
Tangent: Everybody has one. Maybe they don’t think about it often or keep a physical list, but everyone has a set of actors that fascinate them, a “dream team” who they’d bill together in their perfect ensemble-casted dream movie. But you can’t just pick the obvious ones. You gotta take some chances. So in my own personal opus, starring next to Naomi Watts (a shoe-in) and maybe Steve Carell (who I still say has a “wow” performance somewhere in his future), under a director like PT Anderson or Darren Aronofsky, John Goodman just secured a role with some serious screen time.
Don’t get me wrong. I’d add a bit more edge before I was done, edge like Phillip Seymore Hoffman, Zooey Deschanel, Diane Keaton and, hell, maybe even Carey Grant for his ridiculous amount of cool. But John Goodman–Roseanne John Goodman, live-action adaptation of The Flinstones John Goodman–after watching him tear it up in Barton Fink and then own Lebowski, he just became an automatic. My movie will be the craziest and most brilliant tour de force acting clinic around…
Off Tangent: I like The Big Lebowski. I do. Jeff Bridges is great and Goodman’s better, playing a Vietnam vet caught in a crime web that seems to anger him solely on principle. It made me laugh pretty much from start to finish. So why is it, then, that after all of my like for this, my love for Fargo and 5 of their others scratched off of my list, I feel like I still don’t totally “get” the Coens?
In almost every one of their films so far I always feel the same way, that they’re very subtly trying to do something more than what they’re doing, except I can see a shadow of their process pulling strings in the background, attempting to add those extra layers and levels. And I never end up grasping them all. They just end as excess, almosts, things to keep me off-balance and slightly annoyed.
Take John Turtoro’s character here, for example, Jesus the flashy sex-offending bowler. Sure, he’s funny, but am I supposed to pick up some kind of significance from his character? Why is he here? Is his name supposed to imply something? Then there’s the cowboy narrator who bookends the movie but we only actually see twice. “I hope he makes it to the finals,” he tells the camera in the final scene about the Dude’s bowling team. And I have to wonder, Are the finals some kind of metaphor for happiness or for the lazy, carefree “bums” of the Dude’s generation actually winning this time, winning while “taking a break for the rest of us sinners”? And most of all, why is the narrator some Old West Yo Semite Sam cowboy? If there’s meaning or focus to all of this, I’m not getting it, and that’s a trend I’ve noticed in most of the Coen’s line until now. Nothing ever feels quite as tight as I’d like it to feel.
(But I’ll tell you what: One thing I am sure of is that they’ve got to lose this narrator sum-up device. They did it in The Hudsucker Proxy, too, where the narrator comments on how “This is it,” and something about his tale being “A pretty good one,” as if he were closing out an episode of Mr. Rogers. Note to Joel and Ethan: Don’t tell me that your movie’s good just before the credits roll. Seriously. We’re talking matters of principle here.)
Still, the dialogue’s rock solid and the characters are awesome. And I never want to be that guy who can’t enjoy brainless, wacky comedies because he’s too caught up in “depth” and finding inconsistencies. But there’s the problem: I simply don’t see this as just a brainless, wacky comedy. Or at least I don’t think it’s trying to be. What it is, is fun, a lot of it. And the plot might not actually go anywhere and, once again, the Coens have managed to make me feel a bit stupid, but just watching Goodman wear those ridiculous sunglasses and constantly go off, screaming about injustice or taking out his gun at the bowling alley to uphold the rules of league play–it seriously makes the 118-minute run time worth every second.
*Next in the Coen line: O Brother, Where Art Thou?
*But being that that’s 1 of the 3 of theirs I’d already seen (Fargo, O Brother, No Country), I might just b-line right to The Man Who Wasn’t There.
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