MY REVIEW (14-04-99):

Plot synopsis: The Dude Lebowski (Jeff Bridges) is the most laid back man alive. He likes nothing more than to smoke pot, down a White Russian and bowl. In fact he dreams about bowling and listens to the sounds of bowling on his Walkman yet we never actually see him roll. What's with that? All is well with the Dude until some dumb-ass hitmen/debt collectors break into his flea-pit and piss on his prized rug which "really tied the room together" in the mistaken belief that he is The Big Lebowski (David Huddleston), his millionaire namesake. The Dude is not happy with the condition of his rug and proceeds to take it up with the millionaire Lebowski, who is probably the complete anti-Dude. He is a stuffy business man, who thinks that there is no place in life for the Dudes of the world ("Are you employed, Mr. Lebowski?") and certainly is NOT going to give The Dude a new rug.

However, The Dude leaves the mansion with a rug (and the offer of a blow job from The Big L's trophy wife, Bunny (Tara Reid) after having tricked The Big Lebowski's butler into giving him one of the fine rugs on display in the hallway. Thing's take a turn for the worse when Bunny is 'kidnapped' by a band (I'm not sure of the correct collective noun) Nihilists. The Big L is distraught, and calls on The Dude to make the ransom drop of $1m on his behalf. All he has to do is drop the money over a bridge as he drives over. Easy? This is a Coen Brother's movie don't forget, where the simplest of plans have a tendency to go wrong, very wrong. You see, Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) an unstable Vietnam Veteran and one of The Dude's bowling partners (the other being "Shut the f**k up" Donny (Steve Buscemi) , wants to tag along on the ransom drop and has some ideas of his own, namely swapping the cash for "a ringer"- his dirty laundry. This all happens without The Dude's approval but he seems powerless to stop things spiralling out of control as Walter pushes him around. The Dude wants the easy life, he just wants to throw the money over the side and have done with it. The drop is made, the ringer is used and The Dude is weary of the consequences of not having dropped the money. The Dude and Walter ponder their actions for seconds (literally) and decide to go bowling ("Ahh, f**k it, let's go bowling!").

Being somewhat dim the pair park the car in the bowling alley's car park, in a disabled space, leaving the bag of money on the back seat while they go roll. After their game they return to the car park to find that the car has gone, along with the briefcase of money. The car has either been stolen or towed. The Dude reports his car stolen. Back at home he receives a call from Maude Lebowski (Julianne Moore), daughter of The Big Lebowski insisting that he pay her a visit. When he gets to Maude's place she tells him that she thinks that Bunny has kidnapped herself since she owes money all over town, particularly to Hugh Hefner-alike, Jackie Treehorn. She tells The Dude that The Big Lebowski has no money and that the ransom money was embezzled out of a charity fund that she maintains and she wants The Dude to go and retrieve it, but he has no idea where it is.

Maude sends The Dude home in a Limo and as soon as he gets out of the car he is bundled into another by a couple of heavies. In the car demanding answers is Jeff Lebowski, The Big L. He wants to know why the money wasn't dropped. The Dude managed to talk his way out of it. Lebowski presents The Dude with an envelope containing what appears to be one of Bunny's pinkies, and informs The Dude that he has no option but to tell the kidnappers where they can get their money from- The Dude! Things get even worse for him when he is at home in the bath. A trio of terrible German Nihilists kick in his door demanding to know where their money is, and throw a marmot (actually a ferret) into the bath as a way of torturing the information out of The Dude. They threaten that he'd better have the money or they'll return and 'cut off his Johnson'.

A bit of good news arrives via the telephone, the police have found his car. When he goes to pick it up it is in even worse condition than usual and, of course, the briefcase of money has gone. The Dude finds a scrap of paper down the back of the driver's seat. It is the homework of one of the joy-riders who stole his rubbish car- a lead at last. He and Walter go to the boys home to find out where the money is but they have no joy as the fat-faced, arrogant kid says nothing.

Many bizarre things happen after this point; Maude has sex with The Dude in order to conceive a child (she doesn't want a partner or anyone who'll want to spend time with the baby), the Nihilists are seen in a diner with a female with a bandaged foot, Bunny returns home with all 10 toes, The Dude twigs that the Big Lebowski never gave him any money, the case was empty, and he never really wanted Bunny back. The Big L has stolen $1m from the children's charity fund. The plot twists and turns much like any other Coen Brother's movie. The Dude and Walter go to confront Lebowski about his scam, of course he denies it and tries to pin it all on The Dude.

The Dude, Walter and Donny go bowling and upon leaving the alley they are confronted by the trio of Nihilists who "Vant zat money" and have set The Dude's car alight. The situation gets more than a little out of hand with Walter shouting at the Nihilists while The Dude tries to explain what happened. Once the Nihilists are aware of the fact that The Dude never had Lebowski's cash they demand the money that the three bowlers have on them, The Dude agrees but Walter is not about to give his money to the three Nihilists and a fight breaks out, guns and knives are drawn. Walter manages to take out all three with consummate ease. After the confusion The Dude and Walter notice that Donny is down. Initially they think he's been shot but it turns out to be a heart attack. Unfortunately it is fatal.

The Dude and Walter take Donny's ashes to a cliff to commit them to the bosom of the Pacific Ocean but most of them end up getting blown away on the wind. Of course the two then go bowling.

My thoughts: Unfortunately this is the only Coen Brother's movie I managed to see at the cinema. I missed Fargo and wasn't nearly as interested in film back when The Hudsucker Proxy had it's theatre run so I rarely went to the cinema. Only one of the many cinemas in my area were showing film because cinemas these days have a massive problem showing anything that isn't a potential block-buster, and on the day after opening night I managed to go and see it. I went with two friends and twelve other clued-up cinema-goers. In an auditorium seating around 150 people 15 came to see The Big Lebowski on only the second day of it's run. A terrible turnout, but this only goes to prove that the Coen's sense of humour and style are an acquired taste.

Having now seen the film around six times (it has since been release on video rental and just the other day, 12-04-99, on sell through) it gets better every time. I watched it last night and I couldn't stop laughing. The whole reason this film works as a comedy is down to two reasons; the characters are amazingly well written and the plot is completely ridiculous. The backbone of the plot pretty much follows that of Fargo and, to some degree, Raising Arizona in the sense that it revolves around what should be quite a simple kidnap that is botched by the main characters. That is not to say that the film is like the other two- far from it. The Big Lebowski tells the story of The Dude, a character so well written and played so well and hilariously by Jeff Bridges, who gets mixed up in a bizarre non-kidnap kidnap plot. Nobody appears to be telling the truth in the movie and everyone seems to be playing everyone else off each other with The Dude caught right in the middle. The plot twists and turns almost as many times as Miller's Crossing, has Bunny been kidnapped or hasn't she? Was there money in the case or wasn't there?

Hats off to Bridges who really brings The Dude to life in a believable way, without being over the top or under-playing his pot-head, slacker way of life. The film is littered with amazing performances including a slew of Coen regulars. The ever reliable John Goodman who puts in his best performance since Barton Fink as The Dude's hot-headed, unstable, Vietnam Vet bowling partner, Walter Sobchak. Steve Buscemi returns to play a part in his fifth consecutive Coen Brother's movie as Donny the third bowler in The Dude's team. He never manages to get a word in and often sits in the background listening and being ignored by The Dude and Walter or having Walter holler "Shut the f**k up Donny!" at him, a sentence used 5.8 times throughout the movie! The three characters work really well together, with all of them having markedly different characteristics, constantly conflicting with one another. In real life these three would have absolutely nothing to do with each other at all, ever. The Donny and Walter characters were written specifically for two Coen stalwart actors. John Turturro puts in a splendid, if somewhat brief, appearance as Jesus Quintana ("Don't f**k with the Jesus!"), a convicted sex offender, wearing stretched-on lilac spandex and a hairnet he is a bizarre figure indeed, especially when performing his strike celebration dance. Pure genius. Jon Polito is back too, as a VW Beetle driving PI, he too is in the film only briefly and plays his cliched character to perfection. Julianne Moore, playing Maude Lebowski, created a wonderful character, a feminist artist who's work is often described as vaginal. I must mention the characters of the Big Lebowski (David Huddleston), the Nihilists (Flea, Peter Stormare, and Torsten Voges), Knox Harrington (David Thewlis), Brandt (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and, of course, Sam Elliot as The Stranger, all of whom are tremendous. Most of the characters have an out-of-this-worldly quality which is written through all Coen films like words in a stick of Blackpool rock.

The look of the film is a departure from the usual. A very brightly neon-lit LA as opposed to the moodily lit locations found in the preceding six Coen films. The Dude's dreams/hallucinations are so incredibly cartoony (just check out the first one where The Dude is flying fine until he realises he has a bowling ball in his hand, only to plummet Wile E. Coyote style) and hilariously funny (The Dude dancing on the stairs and floating through the legs of the dancers in the second dream). Joel has made bowling look soo beautiful with some breathtaking shots. He's sent cameras chasing the balls down the lanes, captured all of the retro 50's feel of bowling alleys and caught many different types of people enjoying the game and rolling some tremendous shots (like the big, black guy's 7/10 split!). The songs chosen fit in amazingly well and Carter Burwell has written perfectly suited incidental music- again!

This is one of those films you wish would never end and has enough strong characters to make the best, long-running soap-opera ever (not that that's difficult). A terrific, trip of a movie with all of the touches and wonder you come to expect from the Coens. Two hours couldn't be spent in better company than the Coen Brothers and their strange character creations.

EMPIRE ONLINE REVIEW: 5 STARS

Academy Awards, box office dividends, the trappings of fame and fortune, the Coen Brothers have been dancing with the devil of late - Fargo's successes supposedly introducing the brothers grim to the rapt world of the commercial big time. Their immediate reaction, naturally, was to laugh in the face of populism and follow Fargo's black on white trickery with a film as peculiar, original and unstintingly inventive as any on their twisted CV. Hollywood will be as perplexed by their genius as ever; this is a movie that will only make perfect sense if you happen to have Coen genes. No need to trouble yourself, mind. Just sit back and let The Dude be your guide.

The Dude Lebowski (Bridges) is and I quote; "a man in whom casualness runs deep," a 70's fallout, hippy child grown old but not wise as he gets unwittingly caught up in a wifenapping drama after being mistaken for a millionaire, The Big Lebowski. Egged on by his brute buddy, the ineptly psychopathic Vietnam vet Walter (Goodman having the time of his life) - one third of the Dude's bowling triumvirate, made up by the sappy Donnie (Steve Buscemi playing way against type) - he seeks reparation and becomes one of the multitude of parties that wheel in and out of the ensuing vortex of double-cross, treble-cross, extortion, carpet pissing and torture by marmot.

It's a pastiche of Raymond Chandler's labyrinthine noir, anchored not in the hard-bitten Bogart but the Quixotic pothead Bridges (perfectly cast), floating (quite literally in the magnificent Busby Berkeley stylee dream sequences) from one nexus to the next. All the familiar Coenisms are present and correct: the delicious ear for the nuance of language, the humdrum milieu (Venice Beach, LA) transformed into an ethereal alternate world of lavish detail and a set of characters that rests comfortably between excess and insight, each as rich and unforgettable as anything from their previous odysseys. Try Julianne Moore's pseudo-European feminist art freak, Peter Stomare's German synth rocker-cum-porn star nihilist or John Turturro's outrageous convicted child-molester turned bowling alumnus Jesus (as presented in slo-mo to the twangs of a Latino-trilled Hotel California) for character novelty. Visually director Joel has surpassed himself, surreally complementing the fervid script with a trippy beauty. The film's central motif, the leisurely pursuit of ten pin bowling, is transformed into something lyrical and wondrous in a stream of elegant longeurs. The man even sticks a micro-camera inside a bowling ball to dizzy the whole audience momentarily.

For those who delight in the Coens' divinely abstract take on reality, this is pure nirvana (cross Blood Simple with Raising Arizona if you must) , yet beyond the hysterical black comedy, scattered violence and groovy dialogue, there sounds the same song to human goodness which enriched Fargo. In The Dude's easy-riding people-loving approach to the whole mess of his life, you are witness to something no end of $200 mill sinking tubs could touch upon. In a perfect world all movies would be made by the Coen Brothers.

Ian Nathan.

LEONARD MALTIN REVIEW: 2.5 stars out of 4.0

One big shaggy-dog joke, courtesy of the Coen brothers, about a slacker who's mistaken for a crime bigwig of the same name--and then gets hired by the guy to pay off a ransom. Mostly an excuse for off-the-wall character vignettes, some of which are amusing, some of which are just... strange. Minor Coen concoction with a most agreeable cast. Turturro is a standout as Jesus the bowler.