Cast: Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore, John Goodman

Director: Joel Coen

Screenplay: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

Running time: 1 hr 58 mins

Genre: Comedy



CRITIQUE:


Fargo has trumpeted the brilliant if bizarre talents of the Coen brothers. But even Oscars have decorated these siblings with so much praise, it’s palpable in their follow-up to Fargo, the surreally trippy and purposefully hilarious The Big Lebowski, they don’t really give a fuck to the Academy. What is now trademarked as ‘Coenesque’, they write screenplays that barely anyone in America can come up with, tales about both physically and intellectually challenged individuals (usually, in the Coen canon, the misfit and slacker prototypes) that has surprising moral bites to their denouements. Jeffrey ‘The Dude’ Lebowski is one simplistic slacker that may be one of the Coens’ most unforgettable creations. A total ennui-ridden LA time waster, who goes around supermarkets at night in a bathrobe with a pair of shades, pays tills with cheques (even for a pint of milk) – this is a guy who means no one harm and would rather go for bowling than messing any one about. So when a mistaken identity crisis arrives, he takes an insanely simple viewpoint of the otherwise very complicated affair, as he gets sucked down into the seedy world of gangsters, porn stars and other immoral exploitations in the LA underworld. It sounds familiar, indeed. The Big Lebowski is really the Coens’ take on Raymond Chandler’s pulp noirs, most especially The Big Sleep. Both share thematic DNAs of rich, vindictive fathers with sleazy, renegade daughters and shady gang men. Only in the Coens world, the protagonists are absolutely inept, the trio comprised of The Dude (Jeff Bridges having a whale of a time for this role), the vociferous ex-‘Nam vet Walter (a terrific Goodman) and the mellifluous Donny (an unsual Steve Buscemi), and The Dude is far from the detective capabilities of Humphrey Bogart. Which it makes it even funnier, rattling from one chutzpah and shenanigan to another, with Julianne Moore’s unabashedly forthright femme-fatale Maude complicating things up. She’s the Lauren Bacall with more sex and artsy-fartsy disposition, who just really hunts The Dude for baby-making purposes. But in true Coens fashion, almost nothing in the entire plot gets a resolution.


VERDICT:

This is the Coens’ reimagining of the Raymond Chandler pulp-fiction noirs, yet remains in very Coenesque territory –completely clumsy central characters sucked into a meticulous, seedy world of LA pornography business. Despite a somewhat fuzzy resolution, it’s a genuinely funny absurdist-comedy, wonderfully photographed by Roger Deakins whilst boasting a verbally colourful screenplay courtesy of the brothers.



RATING: B+