The big Lebowski [ENG]
Directed by Joel but, as usual, written by both the Coen brothers, The big Lebowski is once again a spot-on movie: ironic, intelligent, masterly grotesque, played by absolutely-extraordinary actors, written and directed in a perfect way.
A weird, ridicolous plot, made of characters that aren’t good or bad, but only completely mad. Mad of a madness that isn’t like Tarantino’s – brilliant but elaborate, conscious in a certain way – but it’s simply classical crazyness. They are crazy, everyone in his own way, but all crazy. From the first to the last. They live in a non-existent world, and accidentally they have something to do with each other, also if they can’t really face or speak between themselves, because they can’t rationally think: friendship – the only big feeling we can clear understand in the movie – doesn’t come out from the words, but from a big, almost instinctive hug. Words are foolish because reason doesn’t support them. And that’s why this creatures born from Coen brother’s’ mind seem to be completely true, sicere, real.
When the words become only a comic effect, but there’s something else that needs to surface, obviously it’s necessary to use extraordinary actors. And about this – we all know it – the Coens never get wrong. Jeff Bridges is extraordinary, mad, he moves putting himself in the completely-drunk ex-hippy place in a brilliant way. He has the face of the failure, but not of the sad failure. His face is that of one who has seen all his believing collapsed and for this reason he looks completely ruined. But he isn’t, because he knows how the world runs, and he knows it better then other people. In the same way is his friend John Goodman, a splendid and ironical veteran. Then we have the usual “coenians”: Buscemi and Turturro, both in little parts, they give us an acting lesson, and Julianne Moore, a parody of the classical foolish – feminist artist. In short they’re all wonderful, but we can finally appreciate John Goodman, a very good actor coming from a sequence of good roles in little movies (Barton Fink, His majesty comes from Las Vegas, The Flinstones).
The big Lebowski is a composite movie, made of parody, fresco, grotesque, quotations for cinema lovers (from the cowboy like the first Tom Mix to the auto quotation of Fargo, to Singin in the Rain…), but it hides under this a story about people, relationships, a vision of the world. Exactly like it happened in Fargo. Sometimes simplicity and triviality, wisely mixed, make good ideas.
