Comedies

Genre Index

Home

This sprawling comedy suffers from being a Coen brothers movie. It doesn't measure up to the invention and dementia of the Coen's other movies. It ain't Fargo or Miller's Crossing by a long mile. The Coen's have often been accused of smugness, but this is the first of their films where that smugness becomes insufferable.

The film follows burned out Jeff Bridges through a series of misadventures. Bridges shares his name with a millionaire who has marital troubles with his trophy wife. All Bridges character wants is to get high and go bowling, but he becomes entangled with the various characters in the millionaire's sphere of influence when the trophy wife is kidnapped. He must deal all the while with the sniping of his own friends. Most of these characters are interesting, but none are terribly involving. One can see the Coens straining to extend the gallery of grotesques in their movies despite the fact that the material they are dealing with is too vapid to produce the kinds of memorable grotesques to which the brothers are attracted. The narrative structure of the movie is a lot like a pinball game, as Bridges bounces from character to character, and watching the movie is like watching a pinball wizard at work--it is fun for a while, but it gets old after all the lights have been lit and all the extra-balls have been played.