‘Big’ Brothers Joel And Ethan Coen Come Through Again With The Quirky Story Of Drugged-Up Bowler And A Cast Of Oddballs

In their ongoing attempts to deconstruct the modern mystery, Joel and Ethan Coen now have reinvented the average-guy-in-peril tale.

In “The Big Lebowski,” their first effort since last year’s critically acclaimed “Fargo,” the brothers Coen — director Joel, producer Ethan — have set their story in Los Angeles, a city every bit as prime for parody as the neo-Norways of Minnesota and North Dakota.

It’s also a city that has been home to some of the great students of hard-boiled mystery writing —the Raymond Chandlers, the Ross Macdonalds — who created some of the enduring mystery heroes: the Philip Marlowes, the Lew Archers.

It should come as no surprise to Coen fans that their protagonist, Jeff Lebowski, doesn’t in any way fit the Marlowe-Archer model. There is little about Lebowski, who calls himself The Dude, that is heroic, unless you like characters who are dope-smoking dimwits with a retro style of cool that would have been laughable even in the 1960s.

Still, as played by the always dependable Jeff Bridges, The Dude is an endearing sort.

Especially when you contrast him to the menagerie of bizarre characters that, in true Coen form, wander through the film exuding only relative ranges of intelligibility.

In classic form, the main plotline involves mistaken identity. A couple of muscle boys show up one night at The Dude’s apartment, catching him in the midst of his favorite activities — smoking dope, drinking Black Russians and listening to a greatest-hits tapes of past bowling tournaments — and proceed to shove his head in a toilet. They also “soil” his carpet, if you catch my drift.

Seems they’ve mixed him up with a Jeffrey Lebowski, the “Big Lebowski” of the film’s title. And in an effort to get some compensation for his ruined rug, The Dude visits his namesake (David Huddleston), a wheelchair-bound millionaire.

In short order, he is hired to facilitate a kidnapping plot, fouls up the money transfer in spectacular manner, is threatened by a trio of expressionist-minded thugs, gets seduced by the millionaire’s wife, participates in a bowling tournament, meets super bad guy Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara), tosses the ashes of a cremated friend into the sea, threatens a pre-teen boy, indulges in mind-altering substances and, all along, stays about as far from figuring out what’s going on as is remotely possible.

The joke of “The Big Lebowski,” and that’s really all this movie is, involves The Dude’s emotional and mental makeup. There are numerous mystery stories that feature an ordinary guy stuck in extraordinary circumstances who survives by dint of intelligence, persistence and luck.

The Dude, however, is a complete idiot. Survival for him depends almost entirely upon fortune - and on the various uses that his equally stupid foes have for him.

Unlike “Fargo,” “Miller’s Crossing,” “Blood Simple” and even “Raising Arizona,” the Coens this time aren’t looking to make a serious point about, respectively, the danger of stepping out of one’s ordinary world, about loyalty, about the dangers of miscommunication or the need for family connection. They just want to make us laugh.

And those who love the Coens likely will. The cast, as is typical in a Coen film, will see to that.

John Goodman comes close to going over the top as a Vietnam-veteran gun nut whose know-it-all attitude is matched only by his total ineptitude. Steve Buscemi slips through nearly unnoticed as the confused ex-surfer Donny. Julianne Moore is all whips, leather and chains, and Huddleston is all stentorian volume.

But there’s more: John Turturro is a Latino bowling blowhard named Jesus, Philip Seymour Hoffman (“Boogie Nights”) is the “big” Lebowski’s overly officious assistant and Sam Elliott is the mysterious, cowboy-hatted Stranger who acts as a sort of narrator (emphasis on “sort of”).

Finally, there’s Bridges. It’s easy to see how much career variety this second son of Lloyd “Sea Hunt” Bridges has managed to achieve in comedies (“Nadine”), dramas (“The Last Picture Show”), action-adventures (“Thunderbolt and Lightfoot”), Westerns (“Heaven’s Gate”), science fiction (“Tron”) and various psychological studies from “The Fabulous Baker Boys” to “The Fisher King.”

It would be hard to think of another leading man (Nick Nolte comes to mind) who would be so willing to dumb down, so good at it and yet so capable of making his character someone whom we might actually care about.

The Coens help him out, of course, by giving him lots to do that’s funny. By having him play off others who make him seem almost normal. And by placing him in some specialeffects-driven dream sequences that are as much an eyeful as they are appealing in a mentally unbalanced manner.

That kind of brain disturbance is, ultimately, at the very heart of “The Big Lebowski.” It reflects a comic sensibility that is has about as much in common with Raymond Chandlerland as Philip Marlowe does with Cheech and Chong.

Welcome to Coenworld. All who dare, enter now.

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MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: “The Big Lebowski” ***-1/2 Locations: North Division, Spokane Valley Mall, Showboat Credits: Directed by Joel Coen, written by Joel and Ethan Coen, starring Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore, John Turturro, Steve Buscemi, Davie Huddleston, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Tara Reid, Peter Stormare Running time: 1:59 Rating: R