M O V I E S The Big Lebowski Directed by Joel Coen Starring Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore and Steve Buscemi - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ALSO THIS WEEK Twilight Older actors set aglow in Benton's small noir The Gingerbread Man Robert Altman goes Southern Gothic with his potent new thriller - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - LAST WEEK illtown Nick Gomez's mesmerizing crime story may be the best movie you won't get to see this year - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Blue Glow DAILY TV PICKS - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - RECENTLY A full list of recent reviews, interviews and table talk. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE ARCHIVES MOVIES TELEVISION INTERVIEWS FEATURES

THE COEN BROTHERS BREAK OUT OF THE IRONY GHETTO IN THEIR WARM-HEARTED -- AND HILARIOUS -- "THE BIG LEBOWSKI." BY ANDREW O'HEHIR | A genial spoof about life on the unhinged margins of L.A. that's a lot more carefully constructed than it pretends to be, "The Big Lebowski" isn't the most ambitious film the Coen brothers have made. (That award surely belongs to "Barton Fink," which in retrospect looks more and more like some inexplicable, almost autistic, burst of brilliance.) But it's decidedly the most generous and, in its own loopy way, the most naturalistic, and that combination marks a new and highly encouraging phase in their work. Indeed, "Lebowski" is something more surprising than a masterpiece -- it's a genuine big-screen entertainment for ordinary people, a hilarious, sweet-tempered comedy that you'll enjoy tremendously even if you can't quote a word of dialogue from "Kiss Me Deadly." "Lebowski" boasts a dizzying concentration of elements, from a shambling '90s knockoff of "The Big Sleep" to a tribute to bowling culture, a delightful visual celebration of artificial light and synthetic surfaces, a send-up of art-damaged Euro-pretension, fantasy/dream sequences that would make Busby Berkeley or Michael Powell proud, a running gag on the conventions of voice-over narration and a paean to middle-American male sentimentality. But more than anything else, "The Big Lebowski" is an actors' film. In fact, for all their reputation as high-concept film-school brats, the Coens (as usual, Joel directs, Ethan produces and they co-wrote the screenplay) have consistently provided showcases for idiosyncratic actors to do their best work. Now they're in danger of becoming a Hollywood starmaking machine: Fresh off directing one Oscar-winning performance (his wife, the irresistible Frances McDormand, in "Fargo"), Joel Coen has another highly plausible candidate here in Jeff Bridges, who's always been an agreeably laconic presence in his long career of forgettable roles in forgettable films. It's hard to find the right terminology to apply to Bridges' uncanny impersonation of Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski, since words like "commitment" and "conviction" don't belong anywhere near this Zen master of lethargy. Let's just say that Bridges' performance makes you wonder what his life would have been like if the acting thing hadn't worked out. The Dude isn't the sort of person about whom movies often get made, but if you grew up anywhere in middle-class America, you knew somebody like him (and if you grew up in California, you knew at least 10): a '60s-'70s casualty with a limited wardrobe of outdated beachwear; generally harmless, utterly without ambition and usually fried. The Dude claims that he co-authored the Port Huron Statement, a key document of the '60s student left (but "not the compromise second draft"), but except for a gig as a roadie for Metallica, he's been smoking doobies and listening to whale-song in the bathtub ever since. Despite his surname, the Dude is not in fact the Big Lebowski of the title -- that's the other Jeff Lebowski, a crotchety, wheelchair-bound Beverly Hills millionaire (David Huddleston) whose young trophy wife owes money to bad guys all over town. It's 1991, on the verge of the Gulf War, and the coincidental surnames bring a couple of low-rent thugs into the Dude's ramshackle Venice Beach apartment, where they kick him around a little bit and pee on his rug before realizing their mistake. This certainly harshes the Dude's mellow, but he's not the confrontational type, so his hair-trigger Vietnam-vet bowling buddy Walter (John Goodman), insisting that the urine- soaked rug "really pulled the room together," pushes him into demanding compensation from the Big Lebowski. This of course launches the Dude, Walter and the rest of us into a willfully random faux-Chandler plot that possesses all the guileful precision of a Rube Goldberg contraption. As in most Coen movies, there's a kidnapping, or at least there seems to be: The Big Lebowski's wife has been kidnapped by gangsters, or maybe by German art-rock nihilists (unless she has kidnapped herself to bamboozle her husband -- or he has faked the whole thing to bamboozle his foundation). Walter convinces the Dude to steal the ransom money the Dude is supposed to deliver, and before long we meet the Big Lebowski's libidinous daughter, Maude (Julianne Moore), a feminist action painter who reappears as a Bowling Goddess in the Dude's fabulous dream sequence; a Hefner-wannabe porn king named Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara); a golden-age-of-TV scriptwriter in an iron lung; the proto-fascist Malibu police chief; and some black-clad ex-members of the band Autobahn, with their vicious attack marmot. Through this bewildering landscape -- captured in perfervid detail by master cinematographer Roger Deakins -- wanders our addled Philip Marlowe figure, toking herb, swilling White Russians and, truth to tell, looking increasingly heroic relative to the dysfunctional world around him. This is what lifts "The Big Lebowski" above the chilly, heartless satire that has often seemed to lie beneath the Coens' technical brilliance -- the Dude may be a hapless, misguided buffoon, but he's our buffoon. His level of selfishness and greed is no less reasonable or recognizable than our own, and he genuinely never wants anything bad to happen to anyone; he just wants to get a clean rug, chill out and catch a buzz. Bridges makes the Dude so marvelously real that Goodman's rendering of Walter, while enjoyable on its own terms, comes off as a little shtick-laden in contrast. Goodman would be funny reading the classified ads, so playing a pompous, bowling-crazed weapons nut with a Vietnam fixation is child's play. (Maybe making him a hyper-observant converted Jew was a little much, but this is the kind of movie where more is more.) Steve Buscemi, as the dimwit third wheel of Walter and the Dude's bowling team, and John Turturro, as their mock- demonic adversary, show up for what are little more than cameos. Sam Elliott is especially amusing as the movie's cowboy-poet narrator, who shows up occasionally, apropos of nothing, to deliver such homilies as "This is how the whole durned human comedy perpetuates itself." The thing is, try as they may, the Coen brothers can't successfully inject a cold ironic core into "The Big Lebowski." This actually is a film about the whole durned human comedy, and beneath its sinsemilla haze and its vintage bowling shirt, it's got an old-fashioned movieland heart of gold. SALON | March 6, 1998 Andrew O'Hehir is a regular Salon contributor. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Discuss the Coen brothers' latest film in the Movies area of Table Talk.

PHOTO COURTESY OF GRAMERCY PICTURES | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED