Andrew Worsdale Movie of the week
The Coen brothers – Joel and Ethan – made their first movie efforts on 8mm while they were kids, doing remakes of famous Hollywood movies they had seen. Eventually they did a pilot for a noir comedy-thriller, Blood Simple, and managed to gather enough money to film 30 minutes through a consortium of dentists. Or so the legend goes.
The brotherly team (both write and then Joel directs while Ethan produces) made their debut with this dentally financed tale – a tightly bound Texan murder thriller made on (for the United States)a ludicrous budget of $1,5-million. The story of a botched murder, it showed many of the quirky traits that would emerge in the Coens’ work to come .
Most of their films since their startling debut have revolved around love-triangles or murderous revenges. There’s even an Internet site devoted to recurring themes in the brothers’ movies – from doppelgangers to kidnapping to headless bodies and men who scream.
After their breakthrough with Blood Simple, the duo made Raising Arizona, an over-the-top comic tale with Nicholas Cage and Holly Hunter as an infertile couple who kidnap a baby from a wealthy family with quintuplets.
The Coens’ next movie, Miller’s Crossing, mixed grim realism and screwball fantasy into the gangster genre. Barton Fink, the following year, 1991, dealt with a well-meaning playwright (John Turturro) who descends into sell-out hell when he decides to move to Hollywood and write movies. A deserved winner of the Palme d’Or prize at Cannes, the film utilised the Coens’ sense of decor, their black humour and love of generic movie moments to full effect.
Their next picture, The Hudsucker Proxy, filmed on their biggest budget till then ($25-million) as a result of critical kudos, was a mish-mash affair with Tim Robbins as a corporate dimwit who is placed in charge of a stock- market scheme engineered by top boss Paul Newman. Along the way he invents the hula-hoop. Possibly their most incisive and intelligent movie to date, it was a dud at the international box-office. So the brothers returned to the noir territory they love with Fargo, an idiosyncratic thriller set in America’s Northern Midwest with Francis McDormand (in an Oscar-winning role) as a good-natured and pregnant sheriff investigating a triple homicide by two incompetent criminals involved in a haywire kidnapping scheme.
The Coens’ new film, The Big Lebowski, marks a return to the manic farce of Raising Arizona, but is still imbued with a healthy amount of cynicism. The brothers said in a recent interview with on-line magazine Film Scouts: “It’s our attempt to do one of those Chandler stories about LA, y’know, with the kidnapped heiress … anyway we thought there was something appealing about this complicated and weird plot being unravelled by a pot- head.”
The daggakop in question – perfectly played by Jeff Bridges, in one of his most charismatic screen outings in years – is the Dude, Jeff Lubowski, who shares a surname with a multi- millionaire. Baddies come knocking at his door because the moneyed man’s trophy wife (appropriately called Bunny) owes many people oodles of bucks. She in turn is kidnapped (or is she?) and the Dude gets involved.
There is a sub-plot of 10-pin bowling, as the Dude spars with his best buddy, a crazed ex-Vietnam vet (John Goodman, behind urine-coloured sunglasses, in his best performance in ages) and a mild- mannered geek (Steve Buscemi with little to do). Add to the pot a crazy performance artist (the resplendent Julianne Moore – funkily sexy and more clipped than Helena Bonham Carter), a group of ex-punk rockers turned into German nihilists and a CD-ROM pornographer played by Ben Gazzara, and you have a healthy amalgam of all the Coen brothers’ previous works.
The Big Lebowski has the same craziness as Raising Arizona, the surrealism of Barton Fink in its Busby Berkley-like dream/dance sequences, the cartoonish look of The Hudsucker Proxy and the stoned easy-going attitude of Fargo. Mayhem ensues but the characters, in the main, blissfully deal with it.
It is a return for the duo to over- the-edge cinema, and although at points it doesn’t quite come together, the visual style, and perhaps the best screen performance yet seen by Bridges hold it all together. The great thing about the movie is that it doesn’t take the easy way out as a thriller – it’s about kooky people, about who we are and who we want to be – and the Coens once again rejoice in celebrating their vision of the oddballs of the world.