Coen Brothers
The Big Lebowski

It would be pure utopia to manage to savor everything with the innocence of a virgin, curious gaze, thirsty for knowledge and thus ready to store everything preciously. I'm certainly not the first to discover that our species is built, in many ways, like a jerk. Soon enough, in fact, we learn to live by comparisons; instinctively between the cerebellum and the forehead, in our wise mind, we draft a perpetual moving ranking that never allows us to fully enjoy the daily actions. If, on one hand, it serves to spur us, the bastard and sadistic downside is that it constantly reminds us of the glorious and melancholic past and pushes us toward a hopefully deceitful future. The result? It clouds the present. You will agree with me that the best vacations will undoubtedly be those of next year: always. But from one point, fortunately, we must start without comparisons. And that's why the beginning often remains seared into our convoluted and Machiavellian minds. The first love, the first day of school, the first…

Can I say that until that day I had never seen a film? A real one, I mean: for 16 years, just useless crap! From that evening, the most famous brothers/directors of contemporary cinema started to make me suffer from a constant hunger for films: I have never stopped since. You’ll forgive my redundancy, but I want to describe “The Big Lebowski” because I am particularly attached to it.

A precious fake noir for a mystery that isn’t a mystery.

The Coen’s direction is masterful from the start, with that bush (the story) wandering and wandering carried by the wind: totally at the mercy, down deserted streets until it meets death on the shore of the Pacific Ocean. End. Ethan and Joel excel in this work in the psychedelic breaks, the result of an embrace between music and slow motion that contort and divide in order to describe in grotesque sequences the realm of the folkloric protagonist: bowling. Not the sport as such but the oasis that the Dude, a pacifist slacker, has built for himself to get by in a society with which he has little/nothing in common. While he writes a $0.90 check for the milk for his evening white Russian, he glances with disgust at the TV where Bush declares war on Saddam's Iraq. Better to drink. There are countless successful shots of characters apart from the bizarre story, but essential for the enjoyment of the film, such as the pederast Jesus (Turturro), the narrating cowboy, the sycophant butler (Hoffmann), the gothic artist Maude (J. Moore) relegating them to mere side notes would be sacrilege.

The Dude is someone who takes life as it comes, who is in no hurry and has little ambition. Maybe a few vices: smoking a joint, listening to a good Creedence song, drinking a couple of White Russians, and having a bowling ball to throw. His friend, a Vietnam vet, lives in the past, forcefully recalling it at every opportunity. Bowling is their life, and with their fragile and marginalized friend Donnie (Buschemi), they form an unusual and melancholic trio of outcasts. Do you find it funny? The situation, I mean? To me, not so much; it's saddening because, although they are absolutely exaggerated and symbolic characters, it reflects reality. Those who cannot (or do not want to) adapt to society pity them: maybe I am wrong, but I think they had the bad luck to miss the decade.

Rarely have I heard an audience sputter joyous saliva so continuously and sincerely. Not those annoying hints of fake laughter but a celebratory waltz of facial muscles and aching jaws evenly spread between the first and second half. A goal fest against the boredom of Sunday evening. The absolute protagonists of the film, along with the constructed and depicted characters by an over-the-top cast, are the sharp, witty slices of humor , sometimes coarse and almost always dark.

It's a straightforward and clear story that could easily find its counterpart in the daily life of your wildest dreams. There are indeed plenty of inputs and outputs, jerks that surface who the Dude must stubbornly fight through an acid trip, a joint, and a drink. Our pot-bellied detective racks his brain to get the better of a puzzle of kidnappings, amputated pinkies, overrated nihilistic bass players, dirty underwear thrown from a moving car, fake paraplegics, porn movie producers, kids stealing a million dollars, and the agony of a green car with precious rust-colored stains that, for some reason, wants to keep living. The Dude, as the hero he is, untangles the knot and closes the circle, returning to where he started: a bowling alley and the tournament semifinals.

A room full of people almost rolls off their seats while a scene immortalizes the solemn moment in which Donnie's ashes are scattered. If this happens, maybe a couple of conclusions can be drawn. That you are witnessing two great actors and that you, as a director, have succeeded in making a great movie. Because making people truly laugh is not such an easy thing, even if you have Goodman and Bridges possibly at their peak.