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 'The Big Lebowski' Satirizes Just About Everything Left Coast. By Stacey Richter IN THE THEIR last film, Fargo, the Coen brothers turned their skewed vision towards the northern edge of America--envisioned as a bleak and snowy wasteland where everyone is perpetually perky, especially the cops. In The Big Lebowski, they've turned the same idiosyncratic eye towards Los Angeles, which is pictured as a seething snake pit of individuality where everyone is frantically doing their own "thing," be it bowling, painting, or giving themselves a pedicure. All of this is filmed with such panache that it's hard not to like The Big Lebowski. The guy sitting behind me in the theater had a big, hearty laugh-track guffaw that drowned out the dialogue, and he was at it through the whole film. The film is pretty funny, so try not to sit close to someone like this if you can help it.
The Coen brothers haven't always had good luck making satires of genre movies. The Hudsucker Proxy, a take-off of a '40s rags-to-riches story, though it had some charm, was generally found to be annoying. The Big Lebowski is far more successful, in part because it goes in so many different directions at once. There is a little something here for everyone; if you don't have a particular fondness for Busby Berkeley musicals--fondly spoofed in some wonderful dream sequences--you can just wait it out, and The Big Lebowski will return to the real world of Los Angeles. Or as close to real as the Coen brothers seem inclined to get.
The plot involves a kidnapping, some stolen money, and an expensive rug, but all this activity seems to be an elaborate excuse for the introduction of a series of odd customers, including a German new-wave-band-turned-crime-gang. The very best parts of Lebowski are the strange little by-ways it travels that have nothing at all to do with the plot: David Thewlis makes a brief appearance as a video artist who can't stop giggling, and John Turturro steals the show with his very brief role as Jesus Quintana, a charismatic but deviant bowler. The most compelling scene in the movie for me was a brief little aside showing Jesus ringing doorbells in order to announce himself as a sex offender to his neighbors.
The Big Lebowski opens Friday, March 6, at Century
Park (620-0750) and Century Gateway (792-9000)
cinemas.
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A Lebowski, if you're wondering, is the last name of guy. There
are (at least) two Lebowski's in The Big Lebowski; a
lazy, unemployed pot head who generally goes by the sobriquet
of "The Dude" (
The good guys in The Big Lebowski are an unlikely trio
of losers: The Dude; his buddy Walter Sobchak (John Goodman),
a perpetually pissed-off Vietnam Vet; and Donny (
This oddball behavior is filmed with the arresting visual sense
that characterizes all the movies by the Coen brothers, and with
considerably less violence than 