D.B.B. watches The Big Lebowski

I finally watched The Big Lebowski from beginning to end. The Coen brothers know their Dashiell Hammett (and they want you to know that they do), and the movie beautifully captures the melancholy and excitement of Raymond Chandler when the Coens want it to.

But all that good stuff takes up about five minutes, and it's not what the Coens are interested in. The rest is cheesy fantasy sequences, stoner humor, pointless zaniness, weird art-house flourishes, and bowling.  I haven't smoked enough dope in my life to get the nuances.

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Smithers to David Huddleston's Montgomery Burns and, in the rare moments when he isn't hamming it up as a repressed nerd, he's stunningly good. The story has a number of plot similarities to The Big Sleep, but the acting more closely resembles the group hamfest of Harper, which also borrows much from The Big Sleep. The Coens love to pepper their movies with references to other movies and to books. Could The Big Lebowski's assemblage of acting tics and shticks be one more such reference?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012