>> Brothers Joel and Ethan Coen unleash their post-Fargo kidnapping comedy, The Big Lebowski

by MATTHEW HAYS

Some of the loudest applause at last year's Oscar ceremony was sounded for the two announcements of Fargo's victories. Joel and Ethan Coen, America's most famous fraternal filmmaking team, won for Best Original Screenplay, while Frances McDormand, who seemed to capture everyone's heart as the film's pregnant sheriff, won for Best Actress. All three winners seemed delightfully taken aback by the awards.

If the awards seemed surprising to the Coens, nothing surprised them more than the box-office success of Fargo itself. Since their beginnings, the two arthouse gurus have had one of the spottiest success stories in history. Their feature debut as a filmmaking team (with Joel directing, Ethan producing and both collaborating on the script) began with Blood Simple in 1984. The film noir update immediately won them massive critical praise; Simple was done on a tiny budget, featured thrilling camera work, solid performances and the kind of confidence usually only exhibited by far more experienced filmmakers. The team followed with another hit, Raising Arizona (1987), an oddball comedy in which Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter decide to kidnap a child, seeing as they can't have their own. The film expanded the Coens' reputation--now they were handling out-and-out comedy, and very well. Then came Miller's Crossing, their 1990 riff on the mobster movie. While the Coens' outlandish style was in overdrive, many critics dismissed the film as pretentious and audiences were left with nothing to laugh at and characters who were just too distant to connect with.

Then came the winning Barton Fink, a tremendously dark comedy which managed to win over critics and audiences once more. Alas, the next film, which ironically enough the Coens guessed would be their biggest commercial success, failed. The Hudsucker Proxy, a film I would argue is among their very best, did not catch on with the public. The Coens simply gave up trying; they would make Fargo and, as far as they were concerned, it would be their least successful film--or so they thought at the time.

"We've given up," Joel says of the guessing game of whether or not a film will be successful. "We used to try but it's become very clear that it's pretty much a futile exercise. There's no point trying to guess this stuff. Your expectations are going to be wrong."

The Coens are preparing for the reaction to their next film, the one everyone is referring to as 'the one after Fargo.' Its title, in fact, is The Big Lebowski, and Coen cultists hooked on their screwy universe won't be let down.

This time Jeff Bridges makes his Coen movie debut as an out-of-work dope-smoking surfer dude named Lebowski, determined to remain stuck in the '70s. When Bridges is mistaken for a multi-millionaire who shares the name Lebowski, a series of bizarre misunderstandings take place, culminating in Bridges being forced to track down the multi-millionaire's daughter after she's been kidnapped.

What may surprise some Coen fans is Bridges' character. Though dope smoking has taken on a certain cachet since the Olympics, Bridges' Lebowski isn't entirely likable or sympathetic. No Travis Bickle, rest assured, but as an out-of-work surfer with a fetish for the bowling alley, he's certainly not the lovable and responsible pregnant sheriff everyone cheered McDormand for breathing life into last Oscar night.

The Coens acknowledge that Bridges may not serve as such an emotional anchor as McDormand did in Fargo. But audience sympathy isn't something they necessarily strive for. "I don't think it's something that we worry about," says Joel. "Making our characters likable isn't something we worry about beyond the needs of our story."

"You have to think about that if you're making a $50-million movie," adds Ethan. "You don't want to make a $50-million movie about scum, because it's conventional wisdom that it's a hard sell. Since we work cheap," Joel joins Ethan and the two say in unison, "we can do what we want."

"On another level, it's absurd to think the only stories you can tell or the only stories worth telling involve likable characters," says Joel. "It's as artificial a constraint as one can imagine."

The Coens' ability to create ambiguous characters is certainly one of their winning attributes; cartoon-like caricatures often coexist quite congruently with seemingly real people in the same movie. Exactly where the brothers are coming from, however, is often hard to tell. Robert Altman is a director they evoke in their treatment of working-class characters. Certainly, as with Scorsese, some of the scenarios they dream up create feelings of intense embarrassment and shame for what occurs onscreen. In Fargo, for example, when an Asian businessman makes a pass at McDormand, the Coens first play the scene for laughs, but the laughter quickly subsides and the scene becomes poignant. In The Big Lebowski, John Goodman plays a near-psychotic buddy to Bridges, someone who is delusional and not terribly bright. Bridges, Goodman and Coen veteran Steve Buscemi play bowling buddies, caught up in a kitschy game of banality, bowling away their lives with little or no hope of a future. The Coens manage, somehow, to get laughs from these characters and yet keep their humanity intact. Do the Coens see themselves as mocking their characters, as Altman has taken heat for doing?

"I don't think we're mocking them at all," says Joel, refuting my suggestion. "The characters are never imagined for the purpose of holding them up for ridicule. They're held up for their function in the story--for their intrinsic interest as characters."

"You never want a character to be merely laughable," says Ethan, "even if they are exaggerated in one respect or another. Many times that simply has to do with the general style of the movie. I don't think we've ever created a character solely for the purpose of making people laugh at them."

Ambiguous and not-always-likable characters, constantly morphing directions--if the Coens are anything, it is unpredictable. As unpredictable as, say, the box office of their next movie. In his new book The Big Lebowski: The Making of a Coen Brothers Film (W.W. Norton & Company), author William Preston Robertson writes, "When it comes down to it, all processes, really, are found ones--patterns detected after the fact and optimistically labelled to suggest intent." Arguing it's difficult, if not impossible, to find any set pattern to their mode of moviemaking, Robertson concludes that, "The Coen Process is, more than anything, simply a dynamic character profile they leave behind on every movie they make."

I ask the brothers about the no-rhyme-no-reason theory about their filmmaking practice. Is there an overriding philosophy or morality to their oeuvre? The answer from both comes in a word: "No." So it's just good storytelling? "Yeah."

Their one consistency, they tell me, is the effort to continue to experiment with each new film. Believe it or not, Fargo was their stab at realism. Ethan: "We shot Fargo as a true story. We even said it was one at the beginning, which it wasn't. But we said it was because we wanted to appropriate the conventions of one."

The Big Lebowski continues that experimentation, with a new kidnapping set in a Raymond Chandleresque film-noir Los Angeles, loaded with cartoon characters--a film that even has a Busby Berkeley-style musical number set in one of Bridges' dream sequences.

"It's a real crap shoot," Ethan says, conceding their latest constitutes yet another risk.

"And the response always effects you, whether you like it or not."

The Big Lebowski opens Friday, March 6