Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania • Page 89

WEEKEND MAG FRIDAY, MARCH 6, 1998 roe. i Mtiv (TTirnrnnnnns I rv fn I fl 1 -r' I II I) fO mf Vw wJ UJ L-w uJ vy -y i T. I i I I Bridges and Goodman go bowling for laughs in 'The Big Lebowski' Merrick Morton and John Goodman are slacker bowlers in "The Big The big man John Goodman always seems to nave a smile, a nice combination of the innocent and the diabolical. Over the last few months he has worn it whSe helping Denzel Washington bottle a serial killer's evH spirit in alien," while affecting an air of deadpan hipsterism in Brothers 2000," while squeezing palm-size people in his fist in "The Borrowers." He wears It again in "The Big Lebowski," Joel and Ethan Coen's kidnap-'n'-bowling caper grown from seeds planted in "The Big Sleep," the 1946 Howard Hawks classic starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Goodman is cast in the Bacall tele, as Walter Soochak, a bowling brute with a lighted fuse.

"Walter's whacked, a real piece of cake," he says. "He's not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree." The Coens tend to populate their intricate, unnerving fables with boldly outlined cartoon char-, acters. Their style demands vivid acting, and Goodman plays Sobchak exuberantly, with warmth and a kind of uncontained innocence. "There's something utterly guileless about John," says Joel Coen. "He's an incredibly versatile actor who often gets typecast in uninteresting parts." Do Goodman's big guys have anything common? He offers a wry half-smile with a kind ol frank diffidence.

"Yeah," he says. "They're all overweight." The Coen brothers say it was Goodman's offbeat sensibility that got him a part in "Raising Arizona." His escaped convict, a "criminal mastermind with a two-digit 10," lit erally proved to be his breakout movie rale. The ticking-bomb performance so frnpressed the Coens that they later asked him to appear in "Barton Fink," their post-modernist Faustian comedy. "What's it about?" asked Goodman. "Well," said Ethan Coen.

"You really have to read the script." Goodman read it liked it and played Charlie the insurance salesman with such sunny menace that he was nominated for a Golden Globe. "Only later did I find out what part I'd played in 'Barton Fink's' genesis," Goodman says. "According to Joel and Ethan, the film sprang from a mental picture they had of me and John Turturro sitting on the edge of a bed in our underwear." The Coens based Lebowski's combustible Sobchak on a softbaB player they knew in Los Angeles. "We made the film out of a perverse desire to see John on screen blowing hard and pontificating," feays Joel Coen. i Franz Lidz, N.Y.

Times News Service .1 v. i Jeff Bridges By RON WEISKIND Post-Gazette Movie Editor Quentin Tarantino makes movies that resemble cocaine rushes frenetic, violent, laughing on the outside and paranoid on the inside. But imagine the marijuana version: easygoing, befuddled, beset with the giggles and an occasional acid flashback. That's the new Coen Brothers movie, "The Big Lebowski," an ode to simple lives in a complicated age. We're not in "Fargo" anymore, Toto.

The Coens pulled together all the elements in their previous and best movie plot, characterization, quirky sensibility, homespun moral. Crime does not pay. Eccentricity is as American as apple pie. Have a nice day, OK? Starting with its title, "The Big Lebowski" is all too aware that it is joking with us. The Coens Ethan, who writes, and Joel, who writes and directs have created a character study masquerading as a mystery.

But the whodunit more of a wna' happened? proves as substantial as a case of the munchies. Instead, we get Jeff Bridges as Jeff Lebowski, who insists that everyone call him the Dude. Scruffy and unemployed, he V'. spends his days smoking pot, drinking White Russians and 7': bowling witji pals Waltef JJ, qhrr manly porn king (shades of "Boogie played by Ben Gazzara and the snarling Malibu police chief who protects all of his rich residents, no matter how they make their money. Then again, maybe the real oddballs are the Coens, who go off the deep end with the Dude's acid flashbacks, including a hilarious sequence choreographed like a Busby Berkeley number in which Saddam Hussein is the shoe boy, Maude is a valkyrie in full regalia and the Dude flies toward the pins through the legs of an endless chorus line.

Bridges does a wonderful job making us believe the Dude has as much hair growing on the inside as on the outside, and Goodman is hilarious yet never ridiculous as a dangerously single-minded Ralph Kramden with road rage. In the end, the goofiness undermines the narrative, the mystery and all common sense. But there is a nice scene in which the Dude, overgrown hippie, and Walter, angry Vietnam vet, embrace in sadness. We get a sense of men who were casualties of the 1960s yet have managed to survive in the '90s, perhaps by realizing that happiness is a warm bowling ball. THE COENS ON VIDEO, $IIPAGE 43.

vvoi, napped. What follows can be attributed entirely to the fact that the Dude is your classic schlemiel. When stuff happens, he's the guy it happens to. Loudmouthed, opinionated Walter keeps bollixing up the works. The Dude keeps running into a gang of nihilists, who threaten him with a marmot while he's taking a bath.

And he gets recruited by the Big Lebowski's avant-garde artist daughter Maude (Julianne Moore) to get the ransom back. In film noir terms, he's the chump hero and, at one point, he's even mistaken for a private detective. There's some heavy-duty spoofing going on here, as in Robert Altaian's "The Long Goodbye," with Elliott Gould as a bewildered Phillip Marlowe. But the trappings are all Coen brothers the kidnapping, the mistaken identity, the bumbling, the quirky humor. They invite us to make fun of the bowlers in their brightly colored togs and almost fanatical devotion to their pastime, just as many viewers mistakenly thought the Coens were making fun of the Minnesotans in "Fargo." Instead, they were celebrating ordinariness in all its quirks, and so it is here.

Indeed, the real oddballs are the bigger Lebowskis and their entourages the gentler movie THE BIG LEBOWSKI' RATING: for pervasive strong language, drug content, sexuality and brief vio- lence. PLAYERS: Jeff Bridges, John Goodman DIRECTOR: Joel Coen Goodman) and Donny (Steve Buscemi). But one night, two thugs break into his house and demand the money his wife owes all over town. It dawns on the Dude that he has no wife. It dawns on the thugs that they're after a millionaire, and this isn't a millionaire's house but not before one of them urinates on the Dude's rug, annoying him no end.

No, they wanted the Big Lebowski (David Huddleston), also named Jeff a fat cat in a wheelchair whose mantra is achievement. That doesn't make him feel kindly toward the aggressively lazy Dude, who has decided his namesake should replace his rug. Instead, the rich man hires him to make the ransom drop after his sexy little wife is kid- 1 1.