A Bizarrely Winning Fargo Follow-Up Seen Best Through a Haze of Bong Smoke, Whether Yours or the Characters'

Rating: 8/10 (11 July 2011)

The Coen brothers' The Big Lebowski is a friendly, clumsy comedy about a man named Jeff Lebowski, who calls himself the Dude, and is illustrated by the narrator as "the laziest man in Los Angeles County." He lives merely to go bowling, but is taken for a millionaire named the Big Lebowski, with calamitous results. We all know people like the Dude, and so, supposedly, do the Coen brothers. They rooted the character in a producer named Jeff Dowd. Both dudes rely on lateral thinking much more than orderliness.
The Dude is paid a visit by two enforcers who obviously have the wrong Lebowski, but before they discover that, one has already peed on the Dude's rug, sparking intense hostility: "That rug really tied the room together," the Dude laments. John Goodman's Walter Sobchak leads the vendetta. Sponging lines straight from Bush 41, he declares that "this aggression will not stand" and insists the Dude "draw a line in the sand." The Dude drops in on the real Lebowski, leaves with one of his rugs, and soon finds himself solicited into the millionaire's conspiracies.
Rich Lebowski, wheelchair-bound like General Sternwood and staring into a fireplace like Major Amberson, wants the Dude to deliver his wife Bunny's ransom. This plot is countered by Maude, Lebowski's eccentric daughter from a past marriage. Julianne Moore, who played a porno actress in the great Boogie Nights, here plays a largely dissimilar sort of erotic artist, swathing herself in paint and launching herself through the air in a leather harness. L.A. in this film is a menagerie of idiosyncratic characters. One of the funniest is a Latino bowler named Jesus. The Dude is prone to lively fantasies when he's punched out or knocked unconscious, which occurs frequently, and one of them turns into a musical comedy set piece featuring a beautiful POV shot from within a bowling ball.
The Big Lebowski tears across all trajectories and never goes anywhere. That isn't so much a failing as its technique. The Dude, who rocks a lot of ganj,' swigs White Russians mixed with half-and-half, begins each day full of determination, but his devices steadily melt into a fog of lost chances and misconstrued intent. The atmosphere is set up right at first, when the narrator begins sufficiently well but ultimately admits he's lost his own gist, a droll curveball drawing our attention to the incidence of screenwriters who will never be unwilling to remove all support from us even after it has been literally soiled by a shaggy-dog-story character we may or may not ever see again in this chaotic plot.
This could never equal its predecessor Fargo, but it's bizarrely winning, like its hero, played by Jeff Bridges with a goatee, potbelly, ponytail and Bermuda shorts so bulky they may have been scrounged from his sounding board and bowling partner, Walter Sobchak. Their other teammate is Donny, who may not be too sharp-witted, but it's difficult to know as he's never permitted to finish a sentence. Set at the time of the Gulf War, here are characters whose language was created by earlier times, Vietnam, flower power and the Twilight Zone. As with Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski shows us a protagonist whose doofus-y simplicity appears to be his sole defense from the real world. He and Walter's very idea of real life may be wrought by the narrow ways they have to express it. Bridges does more with his downcast physical expression than countless comics can manage by laying it on thick.
From its opening credits, The Big Lebowski indeed appears and feels like a shuck-and-jive. That's why the recognizable premise of a staged kidnapping complete with betrayals is only outwardly commonplace. Crime and reason are not the concerns here. What matters is how hard-wearing the two or three characters we're most concerned for are, despite the misfortune generated by their own ineptness. The Big Lebowski---a surrealist farce cooked up by the unruly Coens out of odds and ends of the deep-rooted and the new-fangled, the philosophical and the primal, in a fraction of LA where heightened reality crashes with autistic character interaction---amounts to noticeably less than the sum of its frequently lively and entertaining parts.