I have sitting on my desk two constant reminders of the Brothers Coen: one is a snow globe from FARGO, their hit film crossover to the Big Time. In this globe stands a wood shredder with a bloody leg sticking out as the last piece to be disposed of. It is delightfully macabre, especially when you shake it and it begins to snow like a Christmas in Hell. The second item is an 8×10 photo of Boris Karloff bowling from SCARFACE, given to me by Peter Bogdanovich in gratitude for an early review of mine for TARGETS, the film which proved to be the swansong for the iconic Karloff.

The task is of trying to put a new spin on what has become a phenomenon in film history. THE BIG LEBOWSKI has followed the classic trajectory of Cult films by not being successful when it first came out since the critics were waiting for a follow-up to FARGO and were greeted with this very strange dark comedy which references so many other film styles and directors. I will say right now that I am not going to spend the next paragraphs comparing THE BIG LEBOWSKI to THE BIG SLEEP. If there is anyone still in the dark about this just watch the many supplementals on the anniversary edition DVD to savor a wealth of trivia on the subject. For the record that film was indeed a blueprint for what follows in the Coen brothers film, however it is a disservice to say that is all it is for this film. I believe it will be discussed and reexamined for decades to come.

THE BIG LEBOWSKI is one of the very finest cult films because you can watch it endless times and find new details to savor.

Boris Karloff bowling in SCARFACE.

The Coens are a bit like Preston Sturges in their off-kilter humor concerning the American dream. Like Sturges they have a stock company of actors like Steve Buscemi who turn up with regularity in their films; in fact you will never understand why Buscemi is always being told to “Shut the fuck up” by John Goodman’s character if you have not seen him in FARGO…you see, he can’t shut up in that film to save his life. My personal take on THE BIG LEBOWSKI is more like a riff on the most overused passage in film, O FORTUNA from Carl Orff’s CARMINA BURANA. In it, the known world is ruled by the empress Fortune on whose wheel mankind spins, stopping at points no human being can fully depend on for his lot in life …and so it is with The Dude.

I don’t think so many years later you can separate for one moment the performance of Jeff Bridges from the success of the film with its now legendary fans. The Coen brothers wrote this film for Bridges and it fits him like a glove. First of all Bridges has aged into one of the best actors of his generation, fully coming into his own after the death of his father Lloyd. It was as if Jeff knew it would have been wrong to so totally overshadow the elder Bridges as an actor in his own lifetime, although Bridges has been nominated for the Oscar from almost the start of his career. The photo from Bogdanovich is always a reminder of that since Jeff was up for the Oscar for THE LAST PICTURE SHOW.

I have noticed that a lot of ink has been spent on describing this film as a “Neo-Noir” and while it does adhere to that genre I think it is more appropriate to refer to THE BIG LEBOWSKI as an L.A. Noir since, like Polanski’s CHINATOWN and Boorman’s POINT BLANK, it is so much a part of the Los Angeles scene. The Film Noir tropes are in abundance throughout the film but always within the landscape of this city of angels, however fallen. Perhaps it is safe to say the film is a post-modernist L.A. Noir as we follow The Dude into the now-defunct Holly Lanes Bowling Alley in Santa Monica, where I observed we never see The Dude actually do any bowling. My favorite character, played by Coen Brothers regular John Turturro, is wildly over the top as Jesus (to be pronounced with a hard J). The competitive bowler is in fact a rival who also happens to be a convicted sex offender; one of the great moments is where Jesus has to make himself known to the neighborhood in which he has recently relocated, so he goes door to door with a hard-on in his pants. Only the Coen brothers, or perhaps John Waters, would have thought of that.

Much has been made of the Busby Berkeley-inspired dream sequences, in particular the one involving a cover of The First Edition’s JUST DROPPED IN (TO SEE WHAT CONDITION MY CONDITION WAS IN). This is the piece de resistance of THE BIG LEBOWSKI for me and is set in motion by an homage of sorts to MURDER MY SWEET (also a Marlowe), this time with Dick Powell instead of Bogie. Bridges is dressed in a workman’s overalls with movements right out of Robert Crumb’s KEEP ON TRUCKIN’, constantly reinforcing The Dude’s counterculture persona, which Bridges can summon with ease since he is a well-known stoner in real life as well.

The current success of the Coen Brothers reboot of TRUE GRIT, which also stars Bridges, allows one to observe the progression of The Dude in reverse, even in the final days of the Old West. I don’t think it was an accident that we have Sam Elliot’s iconic sage cowboy known simply as The Stranger introduce THE BIG LEBOWSKI in the first place.

From the very opening cues of TUMBLING TUMBLEWEEDS the film references the Old West (that perhaps exists now only in an alternative universe) from the current west coast of stoners and freaks, but as The Stranger tells us, “Sometimes, there’s a man, well, he’s the man for his time and place.” The Dude is that if nothing else as he tries to avoid hassles but, once involved, does what he can to abide–and we all know The Dude abides.

I was one of many film historians who arrived late to the party when it came to appreciating the charms of THE BIG LEBOWSKI since it was such a departure (or so I thought) from what we expected from the Brothers Coen, yet after repeated viewings it is my belief that this is their masterpiece. As with most things in art you have to reexamine the work over and over to fully come to terms with what you are seeing, perhaps for the first time.

This film will always be Jeff Bridges’ signature role even though he has reached further in his craft with films like CRAZY HEART, in which he ceases to act and simply inhabits his characters like a second skin. It staggers me to recall the bronzed glamour boy Jeff was in films like AGAINST ALL ODDS and THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT and then watch as he transforms into old age with a range one could not have seen coming. Bridges has always observed the conventional form of masculinity, only to play a different take in each of his films of what it really takes to be a man. For all his ineptness in LEBOWSKI he remains a man, in fact, The Dude. You can urinate on his rug but never on his pride.

If the last third of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and Tommy Lee Jones’ senseless monologue-to-nowhere confused you, you can comfortably sit through BURN AFTER READING without even attempting to tie the pieces together.

BURN AFTER READIN brings the audience into the simmering second-tier fantasy we all have (the first is we have superpowers) – what if you were a bystander and Jason Bourne needed you to help him get out of the country?

What if you were walking on 37th and R Street NW in Washington, DC and saw Aldrich Ames putting chalk marks on a mailbox? You know he’s making a “dead drop”. You’ve read David Morrell. You know all about tradecraft. Think it’s highly improbable? The number of marks on the Ames mailbox prompted some local residents to later admit that they did speculate that it was used by spies.

Do you intercept the drop? Do you take it to the Russians? The Chinese? They’ll pay big time, right? Do you hold it ransom in exchange for world peace? How about in exchange for plastic surgery?

But the CIA didn’t have a clue, even though Ames was driving a new Jaguar to work that cost more than his annual salary. When he told them he was selling his grandmother’s junk on eBay, they believed him!

The Coen Brothers know exactly what Americans will sell out their country for! Plastic surgery! It makes sense to me. It is the harbinger of what every American wants and will get no matter what it takes. The hell with the mortgage. So what if you have to declare bankruptcy? You are entitled to a full body makeover. It’s being proposed as an amendment to our Constitution.

At least that is what Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) wants. She is going to get a complete plastic surgery re-do. It doesn’t phase her that her meager salary as an athletic club employee at Hardbodies will barely pay for the doctor’s consultation.

As a CIA department head, the great J.K. Simmons (don’t you love him in everything he does?) is the voice of reason, making the hurly-burly plot come together with his Xanax-induced morality. He’s not the only one in BURN AFTER READING who lives by his own rules of conduct.

Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich) is a CIA analyst who has out-lived his usefulness and he’s a mean drunk. Quitting instead of getting fired, he decides he’ll write his memoirs. His take-no-prisoners wife, Katie Cox (Tilda Swinton), is not amused. She is having an affair with their friend, federal marshall Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney). He’s a philanderer who trolls internet dating sites for afternoon assignations while his wife is busy on her book tour and his mistress is at work. Ball-buster Katie plans on divorcing Osbourne and marrying Harry. It is what she wants.

As the comedy of errors take off, Osbourne’s memoir-in-progress CD is found on the floor of the woman’s dressing room at Hardbodies. Linda’s buddy, trainer Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), has a plan. Blackmail the CIA agent for the return of the sensitive material they think is on the CD. And this is when the trailer moment confrontation between Osbourne and Chad takes place.

I laughed throughout BURN AFTER READING at the clever dialogue, the sloppy plot, the unrealistic paranoia, and the fearlessness of the dumb characters. Living in D.C. must give everyone the hopeful chance of spotting the distinctively colored towel sometimes hanging from a balcony, or the sudden appearance of a potted plant on a window-sill. Every spy wannabe knows the dead drop should be obvious yet totally ordinary.

All the actors know that this time it’s about fun and they all go full-throttle. Especially ripe are Clooney and Swinton. This is their second pairing and they should keep working together. Swinton’s distain for Clooney and her obvious unawareness of his glamour makes her a perfect foil. She never notices his charm. It doesn’t work on her and that’s what makes it so endearing.

Pitt is so wonderful, you’re going to forget his THELMA AND LOUISE launch, his slacker moment in TRUE ROMANCE and even forgive him that silly MEET JOE BLACK misstep. Yet for most of us, he’ll always be Tyler Durden.

As for McDormand, her husband loves her and serves her talents well. And if the ending comes as a surprise, it’s fluid reality (and Tommy Lee Jones will make sense of it).

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY

“The Diving Bell and The Butterfly” is the poetic title of the acclaimed, 1997 autobiography of a leading French fashion editor, Elle’s Jean-Dominique Bauby, as well as this film adaptation (Miramax) by the noted painter turned filmmaker, Julian Schnabel, which led off the Festival’s screenings for critics in mid-September.
‘Jean-Do’ (in the film, the piquant Mathieu Amalric of “Kings and Queens” and “Munich”) as he was known, had a devastating cerebral stroke, at 43, which left him a victim of “locked in syndrome,” able to communicate only by blinking the remaining, working muscle of his left eye-lid. (My partner quipped that Schnabel’s film might be aptly titled, “My Left Eyelid.”)
That is, in order to utter a single word, Jean-Do’s therapists had to verbally run through the French alphabet to gather every letter of every word for his blinks, a brutally tedious business that makes Bauby’s creation of an entire literary work something quite miraculous.
“The Diving Bell” nearly replicates Alejandro Amenabar’s 2004 “The Sea Inside,” which featured Javier Bardem, as the eminent-but-totally paralyzed-Spanish author, Ramon Sampedro, who wrote his way out of his 30-year physical straight jacket by, ultimately, obtaining euthanasia. “The Sea Inside” won the Best Foreign Language Oscar of 2004)
In Schnabel’s film, Bauby becomes reconciled to his fate long before expiring due to a clogged tracheal breathing tube.
Schnabel is nothing if not inventive in lolling the camera over to pan vistas approximate to Bauby’s ‘butterfly’ point of view or interpolating whimsical photos of the handsome young Brando in place of the less than dashing M. Amalric. Schnabel’s final image, reversing Antarctic glacier slides by running them backwards, is ironic, but it fails to work for me as persuasive reparation. Such global warming catastrophes can no more be repaired than the life of an ingenious stroke victim.
I appreciate the authenticity of New Yorker Schnabel’s working in French (from a translation of Ronald Harwood’s English screenplay) at the hospital where Bauby was treated and featuring the therapists who worked with him, even though Schnabel claims to dislike films set in hospitals, as I do.
Schnabel’s first choice of Johnny Depp (who played two screaming queens for Schnabel in his previous film, “Before Night Falls”) for Jean-Do would have been a more commercial one for Miramax, but Mr. Depp did better for Disney, Miramax’s parent company, by repeating his inspired pirate queen in “Pirates of the Caribbean.”
Two footnotes. The flashback scene of the pre-stroke Jean-Do shaving his invalided, crotchety, 92-year-old father (Max Von Sydow, age 77) is the best scene in the film for me. Every stroke of the safety razor is amplified on the soundtrack by boosting the scraping sound. The scene becomes surgical, anatomizing their father-son co-dependency and showing the vibrancy of Amalric possessed of all of his physical faculties. It is also a tribute by Schnabel to his own beloved father, who died at 92, while living in his son’s West Village home.
Schnabel had a flood of film offers following his marvelous “Before Night Falls,” (2000), which starred Javier Bardem as the fugitive gay Cuban poet, Renaldo Arenas. In the long interim since that film, Schnabel wrote a screenplay adaptation of the popular novel, “Perfume,” but fell out with the producer and got bounced from that production. He understandably loathes the 2006 film of “Perfume,” which he thinks truly stinks.
It strikes me that Schnabel’s three films, including his first, “Basquiat” (1996) are all biographies of tormented figures in the art worlds of three nations.
Schnabel claims that before signing on to direct “The Diving Bell (of death) and the Butterfly” (Bauby’s flitting mind and wandering eye), he turned down a slew of commercial projects including “8 Mile” and “American Gangster.” I don’t think Schnabel should have rejected all of those opportunities. Although he won the Best Director award at Cannes for “The Diving Bell,” he coveted the Palme d’Or, which went to the Romanian abortion drama, “4 Months, 3 weeks and 2 Days,” which was also shown at the New York Festival.

MARRIED LIFE

“Married Life” (Sony Pictures Classics) is as prosaic as its title. Writer-director Ira Sach’s third film is leaden and feels considerably longer than its 90-minute length, despite its excellent cast of Pierce Brosnan, Chris Cooper, Patricia Clarkson, and a new blonde yum-yum, Rachel McAdams.
The picture is a highly conventional sexual rondelet of infidelity, with husband Cooper attempting to poison his wife Clarkson in order to marry McAdams, possibly because divorce is unheard of in their bourgeois set. The year 1949 is conveyed by the style of the autos; the Pacific Northwest setting I only gleaned from the program notes.
When the author-director acknowledged, at the press conference, that he was a gay man, I subversively thought, “Is that why the film lacks the slightest hetero lubricity?” I tabled that too personal supposition, and realized that you can’t have homely Chris Cooper as the sexual fulcrum of such a lusty comedy when he is, of course, bound to be trumped by the handsome Brosnan. Moreover, you can’t play off a genre flick like “Sudden Fear,” as Sachs said he had, (in which Joan Crawford is fearful of her hunk husband, Jack Palance, as a potential poisoner), when “Marriage”’s lame script (from an obscure 1952 English novel) seems much more a Feydeau sex farce than a thriller.
Sach’s says his last two films have been “realistic,” (his previous, “40 Shades of Blue” – 2005, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance), but, frenzied infidelity has, of course, its own reality. Comedy may simply not be Sachs’ bailiwick. Patricia Clarkson, however, is “a sunny, funny, honey” treasure of the American film, as this picture is not.

I JUST DIDN’T DO IT

“I Just Didn’t Do It” is the not-guilty plea of a slender, mop-haired Japanese youth (Ryo Kase), falsely accused of groping a 15-year old schoolgirl on a jam-packed Tokyo commuter train.
This honest kid is told at the outset of this excessively long, 143-minute procedural, to plead guilty to a misdemeanor and pay a small fine, or face protracted jail time and a judiciary that is less interested in his innocence than its near-perfect record of convictions.
The boy refuses to cop a plea and demands exoneration. (We see in the opening scene that the offending hand hiking up the girl’s skirt is much more powerfully veined and older than that of the slender, tapered hand of the young accused.)
This near-documentary of Tokyo’s penal and judicial system marks a notable change for writer-director Masayuki Suo from his delightful hit, “Shall We Dance,” (1996), but the poor lad’s ordeal and the ultimate, terrible wrong done him makes the audience suffer with him because of the film’s length and its’ successive repetitions.
The attempt by the youth’s defense to recreate the precise configuration of the train door’s overcrowding, for an exonerating video presentation to the court, struck me as both wonderful and absurd.
It is miraculous that the lad’s defense team could find the vanished woman who witnessed the incident on the train and came forward to protest the lad’s arrest, only to be dismissed by the police. That the judge refuses to accept her testimony, prior to convicting the wretched young man, is a heartbreaking injustice as great as the youth’s false arrest and imprisonment.
Poor boy. He should have paid the fine, but he “just didn’t do it.”

4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS

I felt obligated to see “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” (IFC First Takes) because it was the buzz film of this year’s Cannes Festival and earned for its Romanian writer-director, Cristian Mungiu, the Festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or.
I knew the title signified the length of term prior to an illicit, late abortion in Ceaucescu’s repressive Romania of 1987, and that it was shot, by Oleg Mutu, the cinematographer of “The Death of Mr. Lazauescu,” a great, but deeply depressing Romanian film of two Festivals ago, in gray-green dun color. So I knew the picture would not be pleasurable.
The Festival screening began at 10 a.m., an unfavorite hour for this late-nighter, in an as-yet uncooled Walter Reade Theatre. So my receptivity was not great. In the opening scene, as the young women dorm mates (four to a room) discussed obtaining black market Kent cigarettes with their male, dorm fence, prior to the lead, blonde Otilla’s (Anamaria Marinca) obtaining a clandestine hotel room to relieve her close friend, the dark Gabita’s (Laura Vasiliu) four-months-gone pregnancy, I knew I would simply have to endure the ordeal. Indeed, the film was just as wintry and oppressive as being in the, bleak, iron curtain country which Romania was in those days.
Abandoning the important birthday party of her boyfriend’s mother (shown us in such tedious, tightly-framed bourgeois, gemutlichkeit torpor you could plotz), she deserts her boyfriend’s family gathering to tend to her friend.
And then a miracle occurs, rather like the epiphanies of the Dardennes Brothers’ films, in which love is transcendent–transforming a seemingly immoral tale into a sublime morality. The comradeship and solidarity of the women, complicit in an act that could have sent them both to prison along with the abortionist, transcended the awful deed. (Mungiu, 39, whose third film this is, shows part of the bloody, aborted fetus’ umbilicus, enough to make us severely chastened.)
Mongiu told us he had deliberately eschewed quick cutting in favor of long takes, as well as use of any sophisticated equipment like a Steadicam. He wanted the film to look bare and ultra-spare.
Anamaria Marinco is a truly marvelous actress, but Mungiu, who flew her in from London, (where she made a TV series, “Sex Traffic” which won her a BAFTA Award in 2005) disliked her audition, as he had all the women her age he had seen, and only came to admire Marinco as she became the part of Otiilla on film. Evidently, she speaks perfect English in order to appear on the British telly, as did the former English major, writer-director-producer, Mungiu, at his Festival press conference.