Contrasts in Crime
SHARGEL, RAPHAEL
On Screen CONTRASTS IN CRIME By Raphael Shargel Los Angeles, 1990. Bunny Lebowski (Tara Reid), nymphomaniacal trophy wife of elderly philanthropist Jeffrey Lebowski (David Huddleston),...
...I had trouble accepting that a man with Harry's charisma would agree to become an errand boy, even for a glamorous power couple...
...Twilight isn't flawless...
...Whenever a player steps up to a lane, he rolls a strike...
...Confidential, its great predecessor Chinatown and almost any novel by Raymond Chandler, the film pokes fun at the eccentrics who populate the city...
...But those qualities are diluted by the offensive language and grisly violence that mars too much of their work...
...He is also less cruel and vengeful than the people he meets, and no more interested than they are in industriousness...
...After being so methodically paced that it sometimes becomes more excruciating than tense, the last 20 minutes meander...
...The Dude, bewildered as ever, takes him at first for an Irish clergyman...
...This is the arena where the characters express their virility...
...and the movie has more funny lines than any Coen piece since Raising Arizona...
...Classic L.A...
...The Big Lebowski is spoiled as well by the Coens' irritating desire to appeal to contradictory sensibilities...
...Nor can I defend Turturro's unpleasantly stereotypical Latino, the Germanic heritage of the violent figures, or Walter's invocation of Jewish philosophy, liturgy and religious observance in the same breath that he utters obscenities and belligerent, unprovoked threats...
...Here the most visually sensual interactions occur between bowling balls and pins, rather than people...
...But beyond the pleasures of its performances, this rewarding picture approaches its subject with chilling sobriety...
...The occasional acid flashback...
...Bunny Lebowski (Tara Reid), nymphomaniacal trophy wife of elderly philanthropist Jeffrey Lebowski (David Huddleston), suddenly disappears...
...I don't mean to suggest that the superb cast—which includes Stockard Channing as Harry's ex-partner in his L.A...
...A similar ambivalence exists in the way the brothers reflect upon their characters...
...This time, the action is manipulated by genuinely megalomaniacal connivers...
...Clearly contemptuous of the L.A...
...Harry is revitalized when he recovers his deductive powers, and redeemed by the skill he exhibits in using them...
...The various plots of The Big Lebowski do not eventually fit together as if they were the pieces of a grand puzzle...
...The Coens have never portrayed heterosexuality in a gentle light...
...Harry is darkly aware that his reflexes are not what they were...
...Still, few filmmakers wallow as enthusiastically as the Coens in meaningless diversions...
...Cinematographer Roger Deakins is captivated by the alley where they compete...
...Like the recent L.A...
...Treehom, whose porno productions stand in for more typical Hollywood fare, confesses that competition with video has forced him to abandon "little extras like story, production values, feelings...
...He has no convictions and merely wants to keep himself content...
...Lebowski hires a bag man who calls himself The Dude (Jeff Bridges) to hand over the $ 1 million ransom...
...Even the narrator (Sam Elliot) fails to describe the story as a coherent whole, but it is clear that everyone is lusting for the ransom money...
...One day she runs off to Mexico with a creepy boyfriend and the Ameses, on the advice of former detective Raymond Hope (James Garner), hire Harry Ross (Paul Newman) to find her...
...Fear of the big sleep is never far from the thoughts of the characters in a film noir, but most of them generally worry that their lives will be snuffed out prematurely...
...She has apparently been kidnapped by a band of German thugs, one of whom was supposed to be her bodyguard...
...Nevertheless, in one amusing instance he quotes George Bush to an angry Lebowski—"This aggression will not stand, man...
...The Big Lebowski abounds with digs at the soullessness of the industry...
...Paradoxically, too, the movie condemns Hollywood extravagance by indulging in empty excesses of its own...
...Shot by Piotr Sobocinski in the glossy style of 1950s melodrama and scored by Elmer Bernstein in tones that recall Bernard Hermann's work for Alfred Hitchcock, Twilight has an appropriately evocative look and feel...
...Then Jackie Treehom (Ben Gazzara), the pornography mogul who supplied Bunny with drugs—to whom she is deeply in debt—and the philanthropist's daughter Maude (Julianne Moore) hire The Dude to recover it...
...The scheme he comes up with fails, and the money is stolen...
...The one perfunctory love scene occurs off-camera...
...But his apparent infatuation with Catherine gives his function in the household credibility...
...The Dude is the first Coen hero who has difficulty expressing himself...
...And while the film condemns the pettiness of its peripheral figures, The Dude himself, who may be the laziest man in town, is not only charming, he is imaginative despite his drug-clouded mind...
...Drive around...
...Meanwhile, a mysterious snoop (Jon Polito) follows him all over...
...The idealization of the sport is meant to be mocking, but the Coens treat it with such gleeful affection that they also seem in awe of it...
...When he botches this easy job—Mel accidentally shoots him in the groin—he falls into despair and allows his license to expire...
...Mel, their teenage daughter, observes that the couple play starring roles in each other's lives and everyone else just has a bit part...
...The movie makes much of the conflict The Dude and Walter have with rival bowler Jesus Quintana (John Turturro), a Latino stud clad in tight purple who brandishes a single polished fingernail and is played as a cross between Mick Jagger and Desi Arnaz...
...noir commonly features merciless criminal masterminds who spin webs of deceit that entangle a disparate collection of people...
...Ross is now a broken-down shamus, a recovering alcoholic eager to prove himself...
...Similarly, many of the film's finer subtleties, like Harry's jealousy of Jack, Catherine's desire to manipulate Harry into complicity, Jack's worries about his mortality, and Raymond's enjoyment of his easy retirement, come through more clearly in the acting than in the scripted dialogue...
...The two reinvigorate the L.A...
...He is not much interested in the impending Gulf War either...
...At 73, Newman is still quite a presence...
...Raymond complains about his prostate...
...To Maude's question about what he does for recreation, he replies, "The usual...
...Some of these, like the dream sequences, are very amusing...
...and Saddam Hussein figures prominently in his dreams...
...A 40-something refugee from the 1960s California counterculture, he is laconic and unemployed, rolling joints and mixing White Russians at every available opportunity...
...That the plots come to nothing may be part of its point...
...Benton has always been a better writer than director, and this collaboration with Richard Russo is his best work since Places in the Heart in 1984...
...crime story, Robert Benton's Twilight is free of the cynicism and contempt that neonoir too often brings to the genre...
...The other principals are left desperately holding onto their possessions and their memories, painfully conscious of the fact that neither can provide protection from the illness and isolation that awaits them...
...Instead, The Dude takes center stage...
...ALTHOUGH it is another L.A...
...The film's central metaphor for unproductive activity, though, is not associated with moviemaking...
...I see no reason, however, for a film that is so frequently good humored to turn a severed toe into a key story element, let alone depict Walter biting the ear off one of his attackers and spitting it into the air...
...Jack is dying of cancer...
...In fact, his insatiable desire for pleasure is made to seem hip...
...the photography and editing are amazingly inventive...
...the soundtrack makes wonderful use of numbers sung by Bob Dylan, the Gypsy Kings and Yma Sumac...
...Police Department days, Giancarlo Esposito as a bumbling wannabe sleuth, and Margo Martindale as a cynical blackmailer—does not benefit from a rich, sensitive script...
...Bowl...
...persona, they are delighted by it, too...
...he pans with lilting delight across its rows of shoes for rent, its glossy lanes and its shiny balls, and he dwells in slow motion over the bowlers' ecstasy when they do well...
...Yet the festering evil that noir traditionally exposes is missing...
...Most of the brothers' earlier films concentrated on working-class protagonists who were remarkably articulate and aware...
...The Big Lebowski, the latest film from Joel and Ethan Coen, is filled with the kind of complex intrigue that is typical of crime stories set in Los Angeles...
...It also parodies the genre itself...
...crime story by introducing the topic of aging...
...And he would never have become involved with its other characters if he had not at one point been mistaken for the philanthropist—his real name is also Jeffrey Lebowski...
...In its place the Coens uncover lassitude, miserliness, ignorance, big bank accounts and beautiful but torpid physiques...
...The principals in Twilight face a slower, no less terrifying prospect...
...The main obsession in the lives of The Dude, Walter and their team partner Donny (Steve Buscemi), whom Walter constantly berates, is bowling...
...The snoop, erroneously believing that The Dude's easygoing acquiescence to every deal offered him is actually a clever detective's gambit of playing each side against the other, finally introduces himself as a "brother shamus...
...Catherine Ames (Susan Sarandon) and her husband Jack (Gene Hackman) are retired movie stars who have spent the last 20 years covering up a very dirty secret that I will not reveal...
...The Dude's bowling partner, Walter Sobchak (John Goodman), insists that they keep the cash and use other means to save the girl...
...As they engage and explode the conventions of the L.A...
...The movie progresses chiefly because The Dude continually happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time...
...Crucial to such stories is the detective hero, a jaded, cynical figure who discovers the rank corruption beneath the city's bright surfaces...
...Only someone like The Dude, born and bred in L.A., could have a sexual fantasy that resembles a number in a Busby Berkeley musical, complete with opening credits...
...The Coens' ironic treatment lacks the conniving villain, the crack sleuth, and the satisfactions of narrative resolution that both provide...
...The Ameses take pity and hire him to help around the house...
...Their actors give excellent comic performances...
...crime story, these native Minnesotans also mock the Hollywood lifestyle, a portrayal as disturbing and amusing as that of the Midwestern milieu they ridiculed in last year's Fargo...
...Since the brothers won an Oscar for that screenplay so recently, their assault on Hollywood personalities, even if deserved, may seem ungrateful...
Vol. 81 • March 1998 • No. 4
