The Coen Brothers may drop the ball here, but their bad films are still much better than the average great film out of Hollywood. Here the oddball cinephile siblings seem to run out of ideas. They also don't have the ability to tie their weird ideas together. "The Big Lebowski" suffers from the fact that it's another kidnapped heiress/mistaken identity films in a year that has seen a glut of them, including "A Lifes Less Ordinary," "Excess Baggage" and "Palmetto." The Coen Brothers don't do anything really new with this idea. The also throw in so many desperate angels, that the result is somewhat incongruent.

This film is about L.A., or so the duo says. But it really isn't about L.A. the way "Fargo" is about Minnesota as they try to proclaim. The film has several themes or ideas including war, bowling, pornography, male/female relationships, feminism, nihilism, racism, Nazism, wealth, TV westerns, sex offenders, and death. It would take 10 Coen Brothers to produce a coherent script which would somehow bring all of this to a pleasurable boil on screen. The underscore to this regurgitation of elements is a poorly chosen mixed bag of songs from the past 50 years or so which never seems to work. Witness the almost monotonous use of Kenny Rogers and the First Edition's "I Just Came by to See What Condition My Condition Was In" - or whatever in the hell it's called.

So, what makes the film watchable is the Coen's groovy images, including a fantasy "dream sequence" with a bowling theme that has a dance number which reminds one of the old Ziegfield Follies or (if you're my age) the June Taylor Dancers. This theme of bowling as Zen is used throughout the film and the Coens often get imaginative sequences and visual conjunctions from this leitmotif.

Another thing the film has in it's favor is great acting, although the characters are quite irritating at times. Still, no one other than Jeff Bridges, John Goodman and Steve Buscemi could portray the trio at the heart of the film. Bridges' is the living embodiment of the 60's. His Jeff Lebowski character insists on being called "The Dude," another typical device below the Coens standards. But Bridges seems to have fun carrying out the plot even if it does grate on our nerves at times. Of course, he's no where near as annoying as Goodman, who plays a war vet, the kind it is impossible to be around for more than 2 seconds. Goodman is so obnoxious and so grating that it is difficult to sit still for the film at times. Worse yet is the way he treats Buscemi's Donnie. Sure, the guy is a bit of a simpleton, but he's likable. We get frustrated at the way Goodman always stifles him. Mainly we sit around and wonder how these three divergent guys got together and how something as lame as bowling can keep them friends.

Meanwhile, there are several supporting characters in the film who may not really have a part in the plot but who help to make it interesting. Julianne Moore has a blast as an intellectual and pedantic feminist artist who paints in the nude. The scene where she appears with David Thewlis where he plays a pretentious video artist is quite amusing. David Huddleston, on the other hand, appears as a wealthy cripple (reminding us, in a way, of Michael Lerner in "Barton Fink"). He is upstaged by the squirrelly Phillip Seymour Hoffman as his assistant Brandt. Seymour is almost unrecognizable as the same guy who played Scotty in "Boogie Nights." Flea has a small role as a nihilist. John Turturro has what is little more than a cameo as a Tejano bowling freak/pedophile. And Ben Gazzara plays a pornographer in the small time Hugh Hefner mode.

But the worst part of the film is the use of Sam Elliot as a narrator and a character called "The Stranger." For some reason he is a sort of cowboy/old west type. This doesn't make any sense, nor does his ridiculous speeches that bookend the film. They are tangents from which the film never can recover. Therefore, "The Big Lebowski's" center seems to collapse from the verbose and disjointed black holes that surround the body of the film. Whatever the Coens were trying to say, and it seems safe to assume there is supposed to be a point to all of this, it gets lost somewhere in the translation.

Note.

Also with Jimmie Dale Gilmore.

Directed by Joel Coen. Produced by Ethan Coen. They both wrote the script and they both did editing (under the pseudonym of Roderick Jaynes.

Music by Carter Burwell. Musical Archivist is T-Bone Burnette

Metallica is mentioned. CCR and the Eagles are mentioned and their songs are played. Also included are songs by The Sons of the Pioneers, Bob Dylan, Yma Sumac, Gipsy Kings (who have their Spanish version of "Hotel California included), Booker T and MGs, Townes Van Zant (who does the Stones "Dead Flowers"), Captain Beefheart, Nina Simone, Monks, and Santana.

The Coen's apparently know a Jeff Lebowski in real life.

The script is supposed to be a sort of 90's updating of and a sort or homage to Raymond Chandler

Review written in 1998

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