The Big Lebowski: Sometimes There's a Man

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. 

        - Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder               

Sometimes there's a man... I won't say a hero, 'cause, what's a hero? But sometimes, there's a man. And I'm talkin' about the Dude here. Sometimes, there's a man, well, he's the man for his time and place. He fits right in there. And that's the Dude, in Los Angeles.

         - The Stranger, The Big Lebowski

Robert Altman's 1973 adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye opens with Elliot Gould as Phillip Marlowe waking up in his apartment and sauntering out into the mid-70's LA evening to get food for his exceptionally picky cat. Altman and Gould have always been forthright about the fact that the loosely-intended conceit for this opening was a Rip Van Marlow scenario in which Chandler's iconic private eye of the 40s and 50s had fallen into a deep sleep and woken up a few decades later to find himself a man out of time. Gould wanders through the rest of the film encountering a distinctly Chanderlian roster of LA eccentrics and heavies, a decidedly moral and out-of-place figure eternally yet obligingly befuddled by the modern would in which he has found himself, his mantra an echoing "It's all right with me."

If it's all right with Gould, it's certainly alright with Dude. 

While Altman literally brought Marlowe into the present day of the early seventies, the Coens ease him into the early nineties by ossifying his very essence into the lackadaisically righteous soul of Jeff "the Dude" Lebowski.  There is no cinematic scion more appropriate to take on Marlowe's dispassionately moral mantle than the Dude. As the narrator informs us, he is the man of his time and for his time. Even if the wrong with which he has been charged with righting is here nothing more than an unjustly besotted rug, even if he moves with more of a shuffle than an unshakable purpose through the streets of a comparatively tamer LA, and even though his pursuit is somewhat more flappable than his forbears, there is still some sense of justice that burns dimly within the pot-misted shell of a man who admits in one of his more tender moments that he helped draft the original Port Huron Statement ("not the compromised second draft"). The dark alleys have been lit with neon and aligned with ten pins, the rat-a-tat Tommy Gun fire replaced with the echoing ka-boom of a well-timed strike, but the Dude saunters along through them all the same.

Crime fiction had been the one most singular, consistent influence on the Brothers ever since the beginning. Blood Simple was a conscious attempt to capture the seedy, lust-soaked pages of James M Cain while Miller's Crossing is so indebted to the work of Dashiell Hammett that he probably deserves a posthumous co-writing credit. Lebowski's form is all Chandler, from the shaggy dog nature of the overall story* to the specific characters within (David Hiddleston's titular Big Lebowksi is the inheritor of a proud tradition of wheelchair-bound millionaire plot instigators).  Jeff Bridges' performance as Lebowski the lessor may rest somewhat askew to the canon of cinematic Marlowes, drawn into a labyrinthine plot that he may not understand more by chance than by drive, yet they are kindred spirits. Much as Marlowe's world was irrevocably colored by the Last Great War, the Dude is a man haunted by the specter of conflict, an eternal pacifist whose best friend is a living reminder of an unjust war effort protested in futility. And just as the threat of Saddam looms in the Middle East promising a continuance of the cycle, the Dude is drawn ever deeper into the world of violence by his crazed companion. He stands in stark contrast to Chandler's loner by being a man kept constant company, often to his detriment, yet no matter how deeply he sinks, no matter what he encounters on the way, he is a man of unshakable resolve because he lives by a very specific, very refined code.

The Dude abides. 

And as the world slides to the brink, as greed and avarice lead us to the edge of cold, unfeeling nihilism, he'll slide into a pair of bowling shoes and sip on his White Russian, and we'll rest somehow easier knowing that he's out there, takin 'er easy for us sinners. 

- cs

 *My favorite Chandler anecdote (and there are many when we talk about the man who called Alfred HItchcock a "fat bastard" and so frustrated Billy Wilder that the director  start writing the Double Indemnity script in the office bathroom just to get away from him) is one that occured during production of the film version of The Big Sleep. In the middle of writing the screenplay, Howard Hawks and cowriter Leigh Brackett were having trouble figuring out who had murdered a particular character. They called Chandler for clarification, and upon re-checking his own manuscript the famously alcoholic writer called them back and confessed that he had no idea himself. If Big Lebowksi can be dismissed as nothing more than a shaggy-dog PI tale, it's at least in very good company. 

Christopher Sailor is the Programmer of Education for the Atlanta Film Festival. He also waxes cinematic at chrissailor.com   

The Big Lebowski screens at the Plaza this Thursday night at 9:30, and also Sunday afternoon at 1:00, as part of our Fall Focus on Directors screenings celebrating the work of Joel and Ethan Coen.

Fargo - Too Good to Be True

Sometimes I write scripts in my dreams.

It usually happens figuratively - my brain screens a near-complete movie for me that I then spend the next dozen waking hours attempting to transcribe (and yes, more often than not, it dissipates in the growing daylight as my less-easily-impressed conscious mind sees through all of its holes and flaws). Occasionally, however, I will dream that I am literally sitting in front of a notebook or typewriter, suffering over dialogue and story beats in a way that is only marginally more successful than my conscious attempts.

During one such dream, I wrote what was unquestionably the best work of my life. It was tightly-plotted and yet also managed to follow the awkward rhythms of real life; it saw both the inherent humor and inevitable tragedy within the unrelenting violence and ugliness of the world; it was just as strange and outlandish as I could make it while also feeling wholly honest, natural, and lived-in.

It was the perfect script. 

It was my masterpiece.

It was Fargo.

That realization slowly dawned on me as I rolled out of bed and scrambled for the nearest pen and I had to concede that not only had my nocturnal masterwork been written already, but long-since fully produced to near-universal acclaim.

Flashback to the summer of 1994. Me and my brother are being led by our grandparents through Mackinac City, a tiny tourist hamlet at the top of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. Ensconced within naively uninterrupted tranquility, we begin to wonder what the police force here would do if they were ever faced with a truly dangerous breed of criminal. To this day, my brother playfully rues the fact that we weren’t able to capitalize on that premise first.

It is partly the simplicity of that “what if?” that makes the film so successful - a crime story unraveling within a society that exists in hilariously quaint contrast to the more grisly machinations of its antagonists. We are able to both laugh at and yet also identify with the homespun simplicity of the main characters just as we are able to loathingly enjoy and yet also sympathize with Jerry Lundergaard’s frantic attempts to keep his boneheaded schemes from falling apart around him. That duality, the fact that we are rooting for Lundergaard to both be caught and to get away with it, speaks to the genius of the film. And yet the true stroke of brilliance is the (fictional) opening title assuring us that the film is based on a true story. Aside from giving the Coens carte blanche to follow their plot down any road they could possibly dream to take it while still maintaining narrative credibility, it gives the gruesomely hilarious proceedings the air of that great American pastime of true crime schadenfreude while also lending even the most despicable of its characters a human core that makes it difficult to hate them even when they're laughing as their helpless victims attempt futile escape in the snowy wilds or hacking their partners into bits and shoving them into wood-chippers.

The setting of the story in such a specific place, aside from lending comedic heft to the proceedings, also helps the film to achieve a universality that speaks towards its popularity and continued endurance. This is a world so removed from most viewers' that it may as well take place on a different planet, and yet the corners are painted in with such intricate detail that anyone who watches it can relate. We may think that we're laughing at these goofily polite Minnesotans, but we're really laughing at ourselves, struggling with tireless, often witless fortitude against the cold indifference of the universe to the erosion of even our best-laid plans.

It's possible that, had me and my brother struck a deal to sell or develop our idea right there on the shores of Lake Superior, we may have been able to craft a finished product so nuanced, so profound, and so entertaining.

On the other hand, it's probably a good thing that the Coens got to it first.

- cs

Christopher Sailor is the Programmer of Education for the Atlanta Film Festival. He also waxes cinematic at chrissailor.com  

 Fargo screens this Thursday, October 17th at 9:30pm and Sunday, October 20th at 1:00pm as part of our Fall Focus on Directors. Members get free admission to every screening in this series, so if you're not currently a member, be sure to rectify that.

Blood Simple - Death and Texas

When deciding what story would be most fitting for their low-budget debut feature, the Coen Brothers claim to have taken a very pragmatic approach - a seedy erotic noir-tinged thriller seemed like the best way to make a mark with very little resources. Both the high passions of the lustful leads and the sweaty machinations of their grimy antagonists lent themselves to stylistic flourishes that would immediately signal the Coens as a filmmaking duo to be taken very seriously.

Drawing equal inspiration from James M Cain and EC Comics, the film is intensely atmospheric, all neon, sweat, and blood. It was while serving as Assistant Editor on his friend Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead that Joel got the idea for he and his brother to self-finance a feature of their own, and indeed the older brother's time in the trenches of low-budget horror flicks shows in such details as the seemingly invincible Loren Visser's stalking of Abby through the film's climax, or the grisly fate of Julian Marty (whose overall battering throughout the film is the first example of the typically beset Coen lead character, a progenitor of Jerry Lundergaard and Larry Gopnik). 

Indeed, many of the Coens' hallmarks are very much present in their debut. Hapless would-be criminal masterminds instigating and then being overrun by plots that become much too complex and chaotic for them to navigate.  Colorfully venal, yet compellingly likable supporting characters. And perhaps most importantly, a very specific sense of tone and place. The backwoods Texas of Blood Simple may be one that is indebted more to the illusory cultural construction of the Lone Star State than to any tangible reality, just as the plot takes all of the necessary tropes of the genre (a macho loner with a blemished past, the jealous restaurant/bar owner with the sex-pot wife who has long since grown tired of him, the seedy, low-rent private eye) and turns them on their heads and making them new all over again by fleshing them out in ways somehow both broad and incredibly detailed. 

Not every aspect of the Coens' style is fully formed just yet. Some of the actors seem stuck somewhere between stylization and realism, and the line readings sometimes work towards accentuating the more baroque moments rather than downplaying and contextualizing them within the heightened reality. Equally refined later on would become the stylistic nuances - while there are hints of humor both black and absurd here, it feels a bit more tentative than in later efforts.  Yet these are nothing more than the blips of a very assured pair of artists taking the first step towards translating their vision into cinematic reality (and indeed by their next feature, the madcap Raising Arizona, everything would be quickly locked right into place). As the opening statement of a career, and as a rough map of everything that would follow, Blood Simple is nothing less than one of the most remarkable debut films of all time.

Blood Simple screens tonight at 9:30, and again Sunday at 1:00, as a part of our Fall Focus on Directors. don't forget, Festival members get into all screenings in this series for free. Buy tickets in advance or at the door.

Christopher Sailor is the Programmer of Education for the Atlanta Film Festival. He also waxes cinematic at chrissailor.com

Fall Focus on Directors - Joel & Ethan Coen

Joel (l) and Ethan Coen (r) have been successfuly making highly original films on their own terms for nearly thirty years.

Upon accepting one of the three Oscars that he and his brother would each collect for their 2007 masterpiece No Country for Old Men, Joel Coen harkened back to some of their earliest childhood efforts - including "a movie about shuttle diplomacy called Henry Kissinger: Man on the Go" - and confessed, "what we do now doesn't feel that much different."

There is no further explanation than that needed for the enduring cinematic success of the Brothers Coen. Indeed, the pair cannot help but frustrate the critics and interviewers who would attempt to glean some explanatory insight into their process, some trick for keeping their cinematic odysseys from ever growing stale or uninspired, because there is no secret. They are merely a pair of brilliant and talented guys who have honed their storytelling gifts and followed their own interests without deviation for the entirety of their lives, let alone for that of their 30-year careers as filmmakers. They are a testament to the fragile promise that if an artist stays true to their own vision, no matter how personal or specific, the audience will not only find you but follow you anywhere. 

You will be hard-pressed to find filmmakers with an output that has been, by every definition of the word, as consistent as that of the Coens. At an average of one film every other year, with only one arguable stumble during that whole span (Ladykillers defenders, make your presence known in the comments!), the Coens are mystifying in their ability to hop so effortlessly over lines of genre and tone while maintaining a level of quality that leaves their fans in constant awe and delight . 

And they're only getting better. 

Atlanta Film Festival 365 is proud to present local cinephiles a chance to view a sampling of the Coens' best films on the big screen. We're starting with their debut feature, Blood Simple, this Thursday at 9:00 with an encore Sunday afternoon at 1:00. An equal mix of James M Cain and EC Comics, the film shows how fully-formed the skills and sensibilities of the brothers were right out of the box. It's also the first instance of the duo giving their unique twist on the Film Noir genre, a thread that continues through the rest of the series as we present No Country for Old Men on October 10th and 13th, Fargo on October 17th and 20th, and The Big Lebowski on October 24th and 27th.

Showtimes for all screenings are 9:00pm for Thursday shows and 1:00pm for Sunday matinees. Don't forget that members get in free, so tell all of your non-member friends to buy a pass to this year's festival and enjoy some of the best movies of the last 30 years on us. I'll be in the center row, grinning like an idiot the whole time, and I hope to see you there.

- cs

Christopher Sailor is the Programmer of Education for the Atlanta Film Festival. He also waxes cinematic at  chrissailor.com.