Jeff Bridges is so euphorically wacked as a social dropout in The Big Lebowski that you get a secondhand high just looking at him. Padding around Venice, California, in a T-shirt that barely covers his midriff bulge, he's like a beach bum who bowls instead of surfs. His nickname is "the Dude" -- a perverse moniker for a guy with a Sasquatch hairdo and washed-out pajamas. The film takes place seven years ago, at the time of the Gulf War; the Dude is already an anachronism. Every now and then he'll stretch his back or his hamstrings, but when he's not hitting the hardwoods he's mostly smoking dope and listening to classic rock. Bridges gives the Dude a textured fuzziness that wins the film its biggest laughs and imparts a second-to-second emotional authenticity to its jumbled, showoff action. He's precisely what those aesthetic wiseacres the Coen brothers need -- an actor grounded in reality even when his brain is in the vapors.
The movie doesn't live up to him; it also doesn't sink him. It's neither the clean strike Coen-heads expected after Fargo nor the gutter ball anticipated by Coen-phobes like myself. There's a rich idea behind this spluttering romp, and Bridges keeps cashing in on it. At the outset, a couple of mysterious thugs invade the Dude's apartment. He winds up with his head in the toilet and a urine-stained rug -- which totally bums him out. The rug, says the Dude, "ties the room together." It turns out that he has the same name -- Jeff Lebowski -- as a Pasadena civic lion with a debt-ridden spouse. Steamed about his rug, and at the urgings of his bowling buddy and self-styled conscience Walter (John Goodman), the Dude arranges a meeting with the other Lebowski to request payment for damages. He becomes a pawn in a million-dollar plot involving the supposed kidnapping of Bunny Lebowski (Tara Reid) -- a nymphomaniac trophy wife with a background in pornography. Before long, the Dude is dealing with a bunch of freaks, including a trio of German nihilists who once played in a rock group called Autobahn; a porno king named Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara), producer of Logjammin'; and Lebowski's brittle, highbrow daughter Maude (Julianne Moore), who creates "vaginal" art and has a lofty vocabulary and living space.
In this company, the Dude, a stranger in a strange post-Reagan land, is a rock of stability. Nearly everyone else has elusive or myriad identities; the Dude knows himself and tries to stay true to his essential Dudeness. He's the individualistic western hero -- whether of private eye stories, or, well, westerns -- reconstituted as a doper. (When a private eye refers to him as a "brother shamus," the Dude thinks he's referring to an Irish monk.) In one of the film's far-out felicities, an archetypal cowboy figure called "the Stranger" (Sam Elliott) drifts in and out of the story, narrating and delivering bits of deadpan folk wisdom. ("Sometimes you eat the b'ar; sometimes the b'ar eats you.") At the end, he gives his blessing to the stoned protagonist: In a delicious summation that's part mock-Faulkner and part mock-Thornton Wilder, he muses, "The Dude abides."
After so many '60s types have apologized for their misspent youth, it's refreshingly brazen for the Coens to treat this character as a generation's touchstone. And it's fun to see this Venice Beach lazybones confront the overachieving Pasadena Lebowski. Bridges hits a note of casual presumption and doesn't let the blowhard plutocrat ruffle him. The world may not owe the Dude a living, but it does owe him a decent rug.
What the Coen brothers owed the Dude was a better story. Whether they're striving to wow audiences with their bravura filmmaking or serving up snide Americana, I see them as a team of arty schlockmeisters -- a hip, flip version of what those other slick brothers, Tony Scott (Top Gun) and Ridley Scott (G.I. Jane), would be if they partnered up to make comedies. The Coens are less Merry Pranksters than salesmen of their own cleverness. Their brand of visual humor has a wearying pop-out quality, like R-rated TV commercials; their stylized yarn-spinning relies on lighting, music and tricky cutting to buttress characters who are no more than conceits. In the past, the Coens have either built an airless fantasy world out of other movies (as in The Hudsucker Proxy) or re-created a real milieu in flat, snickery tones (as in Fargo).
In The Big Lebowski, they've joined these two modes and relied on Bridges to tie it all together, like the Dude's much-abused rug. Both the spoofy neo-noir and the parody of life in L.A. are woefully scattershot (though I do love how the Dude goes to Ralph's and pays for a quart of milk with a check). Not even Bridges can make sense of the Dude's blurry interactions. To take the most obvious example: Why is this onetime antiwar activist hanging out with a crazed Vietnam vet like Walter? (It's not inconceivable, just undramatized.) The gifted Goodman struggles mightily but can't ignite this giant mishmash of a man. Walter does have inspired bits. He expresses his disdain for nihilists by comparing them unfavorably to Nazis, who (he declares) had "an ethos"; in an American-movie first, he yells, "Shomer Shabbos!" at the top of his lungs to announce that he strictly observes the Hebrew Sabbath. The Coens want to contrast the Dude, who's stuck in the past in some benign way, with Walter, who's stuck in the past in a disastrous way, always geared for action and constantly replaying Nam. But the concept is more piquant than the outcome; Walter's presence is too bludgeoning. Framed as a still, silent group, Bridges, Goodman and Steve Buscemi (the sweet-natured third guy on their bowling team) are funnier than they are in action. In general, the Coens stumble when they try to be virtuosos and buffoons at the same time. A Busby Berkeley dream sequence overflows with goofiness (the chorus girls wear bowling-pin hats, Julianne Moore a Valkyrie outfit). But the one riotous moment comes early -- the first sight of the Dude pumping like a stoned drum major to "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)."
