The Big Lebowski
With Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore, Steve Buscemi, David Huddleston, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John Turturro, David Thewlis, Ben Gazzara, and Jon Polito.
With Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Gene Hackman, James Garner, Stockard Channing, Reese Witherspoon, and Giancarlo Esposito.
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My preference for Twilight over The Big Lebowski could be generational. I’m much closer in age to Bridges than to Newman, yet Benton takes me back to a world that I recognize more vividly than the Coens’ TV patchwork, and I prefer Benton and Richard Russo’s witty, functional dialogue and sturdy plot construction to the Coens’ gaudy bag of tricks, whose cleverness and imagination exist mainly for their own sake. Both of these labyrinthine stories are mired in movie memories that the filmmakers try to reconcile with their visions of Los Angeles in the 90s, but Benton’s references mainly run to the late westerns of Howard Hawks and to his own previous feature, Nobody’s Fool (also starring Newman and coscripted by Russo), whereas the Coen brothers, characteristically, are all over the map, taking in Busby Berkeley, The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Cutter’s Way, After Hours, and their own Barton Fink. Both movies are studded with stars and familiar faces, but Benton follows the Hawksian practice of honing all his cast members into a homogeneous, interactive unit, while the Coen brothers are more interested in lining up a succession of autonomous freaks.
Twilight has a certain amount of trouble simply getting started. It opens with a prologue set at a Mexican resort in 1995, then cuts to Los Angeles two years later, only to launch an extended flashback a few days prior to this second beginning. Newman’s character, Harry Ross, is a former cop and retired private detective now living in the garage apartment of his best friends, a wealthy couple who used to be movie stars (Gene Hackman and Susan Sarandon). Though Ross periodically narrates the flashback offscreen, his monologue veers between a tape-recorded statement to the police and a more intimate, Marlowe-style confession of past failures that’s aimed at us; it hovers over the action like a disembodied, free-floating lament, never quite connecting with the on-screen story. All this is as cumbersome as it sounds, but at least it delivers the goods in a single, streamlined package. We never learn anything about Harry’s past as a husband and father, and intuit only a few traces of his background as a cop and a former alcoholic, but we discover a great deal about his emotional life in relation to his friends and former colleagues, which is all the film really cares about.
“[This film is] only intermittently relieved by waiting for moments when Lily Tomlin can outclass her dopey dialogue, and mainly stuck in endless Tales From the Crypt where pleasant memories of Hitchcock, Rio Bravo, and The Long Goodbye get dehydrated, battered together, balled up, and flattened into puny pancakes, like the inglorious waffle that Nickelodeon made out of John Ford and slapstick.”
In aspiration as well as achievement Twilight resembles El Dorado more than Rio Bravo or Rio Lobo, not least because it harks back to Nobody’s Fool just as El Dorado harks back to its own predecessor. When Newman and Stockard Channing speak about Catalina in Twilight, either as a fond memory or as a possible future outing, it’s an obvious reference to Newman and Melanie Griffith’s conversations about Hawaii in Nobody’s Fool, where it’s simply an oft-deferred fantasy. And when it addresses class loyalty, Twilight forms a complex dialectic with Nobody’s Fool: the earlier film concentrated on working-class ties in a small east-coast town, whereas this one focuses on upper-class ties in a large west-coast city, with implications much more sinister and ambiguous.
