GODS AMONG US
In our regular series, we pay tribute to the towering, mega-watt stars who still roam Hollywood
The dedicated zen wizard who makes effortlessness look easy JEFF BRIDGES
THE LEBOWSKI FEST of 2005 was in full swing. Quite frankly, those lucky enough to be crammed into the Knitting Factory Club on Hollywood Boulevard, worshippers at the altar of screwball noir The Big Lebowski, were nearing a state of delirium when the headline act was finally introduced. It had been announced that he was coming, but still no-one could quite believe it. But here it was, the miracle: “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage, JEFF BRIDGES!!”
As the laconic actor strolled into his very first Lebowski Fest, those trademark locks cascading to his shoulders, jellies clamped to his feet, a smile as familiar as sunlight, his backing band, The Abiders (natch), strumming the opening bars to Bob Dylan’s ‘The Man In Me’, the effect leaned more towards Charlie Kaufman than Coen brother.
“It was my Beatles moment,” marvelled Bridges to Matthew Mcconaughey during a Variety event in 2016, recalling a sea of Dudes in front of him. Grown men wept into their White Russians, dabbing runny noses on towelling sleeves. As he surveyed the sweaty crowd, he registered Walters, Donnys, Maudes, nihilists, bowling pins, and, if his eyes did not deceive him, one enterprising soul had come as Jackie Treehorn’s obscene doodle.
Let’s put a pin in the historical record right here. This is the nonpareil moment of Bridges’ elevation to most beloved star in Hollywood. If Jesus had strolled onto that stage, the decibel level would have scored a distant second. And there were a fair few Jesuses among the crowd too, dressed in embroidered purple jumpsuits and hair nets. Later, backstage, Bridges looked happy but bewildered. “I just think it’s a weird dream I’m having, man,” he gasped to a fan
— the moment caught on phone and preserved on Youtube. He could have been talking about his whole career.
Here’s what is obvious. In later life, Bridges abides. He is a genuine icon, a national treasure, an actor who has risen above the fray. He is
the Zen superstar. Only Meryl Streep is on the same level, beyond reproach.
Is he at peace with the fact that The Dude may well be his epitaph, the talk-show hosts always ask? ”Of course,” he beamed to Conan O’brien in 2016, stroking the lustrous, white beard as vital to the overall effect as on Santa Claus. “It’s a masterpiece, man.” He knows that everywhere he goes, he takes The Dude with him. Actor and signature role have become almost indivisible. They share the same first name, the same amiable nature, the same need to please.
Here’s what is less obvious. The Dude distorts the picture. It is too simple to view Bridges’ 50-plus-year career through the prism of his current status as Hollywood’s favourite uncle. In fact, his career makes little sense. The hits are fewer than you might think (even The Dude came out of the creative womb trussed up like a turkey). He has thrived on the margins. The heavenly looks don’t fit the twitchy body language. It’s hard to get a fix on him. Why is Bridges a superstar? He doesn’t add up to one. Historian David Thomson likens him to Robert Mitchum in his New Biographical Dictionary Of Film, which gives you pause. Mitchum, really? It’s the lack of self-importance and innate scepticism toward his chosen craft. Indeed, during an indeterminate 1980s, Bridges took the Mitchum part in Taylor Hackford’s remake of Out Of The Past, the oil-slick-smooth Against All Odds.
Bridges has doubted every role he’s taken. Even The Dude. “You’ve got to try and drag me to the party,” he confessed to the Independent in 2018. And it is that uncertainty that gives him authenticity. We mistake his grace for calm. He’s barely stopped working since his career began in earnest in 1971, changing with the decade, never fully at home in any era. Beneath the still surface, his legs are churning the water.
Few are as dedicated to their craft. It takes an incredible amount of research and application to look as if he’s rolled out of bed and onto set. “It takes an effort to be effortless,” he grinned to Mcconaughey in their Variety summit.
But after all that work, all that doubt, he said, just before the first take, he clears his mind and lets the Zen flood in.
JEFFREY LEON BRIDGES was never sure he wanted to act. You can blame Peter Bogdanovich and Tennessee Williams and Clint Eastwood, and, of course, his old man.
In that Hollywood way, it was preordained that he would follow in his father’s footsteps; he was only six months old when he made his debut as Jane Greer’s baby in The Company She Keeps. Jeff was the third son of Lloyd Bridges, an effervescent, fast-talking journeyman who had appeared in High Noon and A Walk In The Sun, and later as the glue-sniffing air-traffic wonk in Airplane!. Lloyd liked work to be a family affair. Jeff and older brother Beau featured in episodes of his smash television series Sea Hunt as easily as sitting down to dinner. Instead of bedtime stories, Jeff got advice on the finer points of acting — don’t wait to say your lines, listen to what is being said to you. His much-loved mother, Dorothy Bridges, was also an actor, and it was a tight family unit at the centre of things, with a home in the Holmby Hills, adjacent to the Los Angeles Country Club.
From childhood, Bridges had been pathologically indecisive. “My mom calls it abulia,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2011. “Isn’t that a good word, abulia? They say it’s a mental illness for people who can’t make up their mind.” Like any teen, he yearned to find his own path. Maybe he could be a painter or a musician.
Military Academy gave way to a stint in the Coast Guard, but he kept up acting classes at the Herbert Berghof Studio in New York. Acting was (still is) a way of settling his pinballing thoughts — of bringing the world into focus.
The breakthrough came the old-fashioned way. His agent sent him along to an audition. Critic-turned-director Bogdanovich was adapting Larry Mcmurtry’s bustling tale of small-town Texan life, The Last Picture Show, and was set on fresh faces. Duane Jackson was a perfect fit for a 19-year-old Bridges: he’s the town beau, a football star, dating Cybill Shepherd’s Jacy, but dissatisfaction will drive him to enlist for Korea. Bogdanovich knew it as soon as Bridges walked through the door. He was so damn likeable. Duane was colder on the page, explained Bogdanovich in The Last Picture Show: A Look Back: “I knew that Jeff would give him additional warmth.” “Additional warmth” might as well be on his résumé. The Academy was charmed into giving him his first Oscar nomination.
It was some start. Then, after John Huston’s boxing drama Fat City and Robert Benton’s excellent tale of Civil War draft-dodgers, Bad Company, came John Frankenheimer’s The
The Iceman Cometh. Talked into it, Bridges found himself inspired. It was the first time he considered himself an actor. Playing tragic, goofy sidekick to a peak Eastwood in the delightful heist comedy Thunderbolt And Lightfoot sealed the deal, with debutant director Michael Cimino portraying him as a deranged angel. Bridges had a ball, even if Eastwood grouched over how the film turned out. He knew the kid was stealing the show. Bridges landed another Oscar nomination — his second in three years. For all the doubts, all the abulia, it really did look effortless, as if he could conjure up a character out of pure charisma.
BRIDGES HAS NEVER assembled a career according to the rules. Or taken stock of his place among the vagaries of Hollywood fashion. The agents tried their darnedest, but he simply worked on instinct. Nevertheless, the poster boy for ’70s non-conformism faced an ’80s where it was all about the franchise and the halo of special effects.
To be fair, Bridges had checked the flow of his mystique midway through the previous decade by sharing the screen with a 55-foot mechanical gorilla (hell, Kong has nothing on Walter Sobchak) — or as it turned out, in a fraught production, mostly make-up man Rick Baker in an ape suit. Bringing King Kong
up to date looked like a winner: Bridges as the tanned palaeontologist, Jessica Lange in the Fay Wray role, a modern-day vibe, and despite appearances it made money.
The film is a laughing stock these days, but Bridges has no regrets: two months in Hawaii, hanging out with Lange, watching a giant furry hand break down… “I did Kong not because this could really be good for my career but because I used to ditch school, pretend I was sick, so I could watch the original on TV,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2011. “It was like a child thing, very similar to why I did Tron.
There’s a kid in me that’s still alive, and it bubbles up that way.”
If King Kong remade the past, the newfangled Tron was ahead of its time. Here was a film set inside a computer game, and more like a dream than a shoot. They were kitted out in leotards and hockey helmets, with the
soundstages enshrouded in monochrome. In its whirl of light cycles and disc battles, another cult was born. And somehow, Bridges looked right at home.
Truthfully, he had the wrong rhythm to be an action hero. He looked the part, but never felt the part. His delivery remains a riddle of hems and haws and sudden verbal flurries, at once rambling and manic. He doesn’t seem to be concentrating.
It speaks volumes about the crazy paving of Bridges’ career that between his special-effect extravaganzas, he made the greatest flop of all time. Cimino returned with the part of the naïf, top-hatted entrepreneur who builds the titular rink in Heaven’s Gate, a swooning Western centred on the Johnson County War of 1889’93. It’s a genre that suits Bridges’ odd syncopations and versatile hair. So he did his long months in Montana, captive to Cimino’s furtive muse as Heaven’s Gate swelled into monomaniacal indulgence.
According to distinguished musician T Bone Burnett, 1984 space oddity Starman is key to understanding his friend. “A lot of people think The Dude is Jeff,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2011, “but the character in Starman is closest, because he seems to look at everything from outer space.” In John Carpenter’s sci-fi romance, Bridges is essentially a dishy E.T.: an alien clothed in human skin, the identikit body of Karen Allen’s recently deceased husband. The film plays a little goofy, but there is still something startlingly daring about Bridges’ jerky mannerisms and angular line-readings; you can almost picture the alien pressing at his skin from beneath. It’s a tour de force that earned another Oscar nomination.
QED: Bridges was more starman than star. He soared in roles that channelled his uncertainty. Raw as the wronged man in neo-noir Cutter’s Way, cunningly beautiful in courtroom thriller Jagged Edge. His lead performance in Francis Ford Coppola’s excellent Tucker: The Man And His Dream, the late-1940s tale of a failed American dreamer, is another deviant one, suggesting charisma can be a form of madness, with Bridges well aware he was channelling Coppola as much as the mercurial Tucker. And something of himself too.
BY THE 1990s Bridges was impossible to pin down. He cultivated studies in strangeness, drawn to lost souls and unconventional directors. A troubled shock-jock in The Fisher King, taut as a drum-skin as the burdened ex-con in American Heart, horrifyingly plausible as a serial killer in The Vanishing.
Life poured into art in The Fabulous Bakers Boys, in which he and Beau played a pair of ivory-tinkling brothers riven by the arrival of Michelle Pfeiffer’s stop-the-traffic-gorgeous crooner Susie Diamond. Jeff’s Jack Baker has the better looks, the easy charm, and the greater talent; Beau’s Frank is bitter and more driven.
The film is one of the great studies of entertainment’s lonely fringes.
Then came Peter Weir’s sublime Fearless.
In terms of pure performance, Bridges’ portrayal of a man who walks from an air crash convinced he is unbreakable is the apotheosis of his unique gifts. It’s an astonishing, unnerving trajectory. He took persuading, but as Weir explained to
Movieline in 1993, with Bridges there were “sparks that were way above simply good craft”. He was in touch with unknowable frequencies.
Cometh Lebowski. So dominant is the Venice Beach hippy on the American cultural landscape (‘Dudeism’ has 600,000 registered members) that Bridges’ career can be divided into before The Dude and after The Dude, or if you are into the whole brevity thing: BD and AD. Like Weir, the Coens only ever wanted Bridges. It is a monument to the actor’s versatility that he came to The Dude having played Wild Bill Hickok with brutish power and a glorious moustache in Walter Hill’s flawed Wild Bill, then the sun-polished captain in Ridley Scott’s sailing tragedy White Squall, and Barbra Streisand’s love interest in The Mirror Has Two Faces.
Were they really so alike, man and Dude? Bridges confessed there were periods in his life when he enjoyed a joint or two, a drink, and the freedom of surf shorts. “When I read the script,” he laughed to Mcconaughey during that 2016
Variety gabble, “I wondered if they had been stalking me.” That script was a marvel, the character fragrant, the directors as delightfully off-beam and wackily coiffured as their hero. Yet he dallied.
“I was concerned about taking that part because it was sort of romancing a stoner, a pothead,” he admitted on Conan in 2016 . What would his daughters think? So he asked, and Jessie, his youngest, put him straight. “Dad, you are an actor, it’s just pretending.” Well, near enough.
Here’s the thing. Watch The Big Lebowski again — it remains a constant delight, a bonafide American classic as quotable as Casablanca (though with marginally more F-bombs). You’re remembering it wrong. Far from a warm, karmic fug, inveterate bum, regular bowler and haphazard gumshoe Jeffrey ‘The Dude’ Lebowski spends the majority of the film in a state of extreme agitation. This is partly down to the twists of the Coens’ motley rejig of Raymond Chandler, but mostly the result of taking advice from BFF, ersatz-wife and hair-trigger nutball Walter Sobchak (John Goodman, creating an equal and opposite to Bridge’s ruffled poise — sanguine psychosis). It’s a peerless double act, and a thing of wonder. Truly, a beautiful friendship. Heat with drop-outs.
The Dude abides in the company of Rick Blaine, Atticus Finch, Peter Venkman et al, as one of the great American characters. And Bridges climbed mountains to achieve such lo-fi splendour: the staccato delivery, the synthesis
of line and body language, words trailing into gestures — the entire symphony of Dudeness required a musicality. He knew every beat, every pause, every shrug. He and his directors were as one. As related in Ronald Bergan’s book The Coen Brothers, he only ever had a single question for either Joel or Ethan, depending on who was closest: had he “burned one” on the way over? If the answer came in the affirmative, he would furiously rub his eyes before the take. That’s art, man.
AD, THE AFFECTION for Bridges runs as full as a river across his Montana ranch. As long as Bridges is about, then this business can’t be all bad. Ever curious, he even tried his hand at a Marvel movie, starring as the villain Obadiah Stane in 2008’s Iron Man. Talking to GQ in 2018, he recalled furiously rewriting the script with “Downey and Favreau” in their trailers, fretting where all this was going, before the Zen descended.
With nothing to prove, he is still proving something to himself. The slovenly Dude conferred a new authority on Bridges. He gained his fourth Oscar nomination as the droll President in The Contender, and on his fifth attempt the Oscar arrived with the insistence of gravity. The man was due. Naturally, he fought Crazy Heart all the way. The story of a countryand-western star undone by alcohol had been written for him.
It was only when Burnett offered to write some songs for Otis ‘Bad’ Blake that the character made sense. He was another lost soul.
In 2010 Bridges returned — as uncertainly as ever — to the company of the Coens for True Grit and boozeslurred, one-eyed marshal Rooster Cogburn, guiding Mattie Ross (an imperious Hailee Steinfeld) into the fable-like frontier. Why remake a John Wayne movie, he asked? They weren’t, they implored: this was a new version of the book. Reading Charles Portis’ novel, he understood — it was about the language, that particular cadence. Rooster is Bridges in his pomp, chewing his lines like tobacco.
He also returned to the interior world of Tron with Tron: Legacy and the trip of playing opposite his younger self. Trapped within an evolving game universe, his older self, Kevin Flynn, is a symbolic take on late Bridgesness: you know, cooled on Buddhist waves in his digital pad, Kubrickian floor-lighting really tying the room together, occasional acid flashback. Bridges even brought his personal Zen master — fellow called Bernie Glassman, huge Lebowski fan — on as script advisor. “Well, one of my concerns about getting into this movie was that it wouldn’t just be a special-effects movie,” he explained to Cinemablend in 2010. “That it would have some helpful mythology to it.”
So it’s another curio for a blockbuster. His young, brash, digital copy, CLU, was modelled on his look in Against All Odds, and light cycles apart, the film serves as a commentary on the evolution of Bridges within the alt-universe of Hollywood. Meanwhile, in the compelling neo-western Hell Or High Water, he spun all that adoration on its head to play the villainous old sheriff and we only loved him more, basking in his gruff humour, an ease you know took dedication. Then, he brought a soulfulness to the cloth as Father Daniel Flynn in neo-noir jukebox Bad Times At The El Royale, and we eagerly await The Old Man, an espionage series about former CIA agent Dan Chase, who has gone to ground with his secrets.
Amid the outpouring of concern and fondness that followed Bridges’ diagnosis of lymphoma in 2020, and the successful treatment diarised on social media like his latest role, no-one dared offer any kind of retrospective. A universe without Bridges is unthinkable. He must abide. We cling to that like a life-raft in troubled waters. In beautiful, haunting, joyous, paradoxical waves of hyperactive Zen, he has shown us what it is to be human. Now let’s bowl.