Cutter's Way Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London

Saw this at the NFT last night:

‘Cutter’s Way’ feels like a farewell to the ’70s: to honest political activism, social responsibility, excessive but essentially good-natured drug and alcohol abuse, Vietnam, California and the young Bridges. His character, Richard Bone, clings to his fading prime the way his best friend and mentor, crippled war veteran Alex Cutter (John Heard) clings to his walking stick. Together, the two men attempt to solve a murder, but that’s window dressing: this is a tale of friendship, endurance and loss, and one of the saddest movies ever made.

Indeed it is, indeed it is. There was quite a bit of sniffling in the auditorium by the final reel. But what’s also striking is how the premise of the film is virtually identical to The Big Lebowski. This observation is corroborated elsewhere by Geoff Andrew, Head of Film Programme at the BFI, in an interview with Park Circus (the film distribution company behind the limited re-release of Cutter’s Way):

It’s set in and around LA, Bridges plays a beach-bum, he has a deranged Vietnam veteran friend, and the third person in the line-up is a nice person the other two tend to treat as a doormat and who ends up… well, I don’t want to give the game away. But these three ne’er-do-wells go up against a rich and famous Mr Big. Sound familiar?

So, effectively, The Coen Brothers took “one of the saddest movies ever made” and remade it as a comedy. It kind of detracts from the stoned majesty of The Big Lebowski, knowing that it wasn’t cut from wholy original cloth (and yes, I know it was also parodying The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye). But it’s also a lesson in storytelling, in the way that two markedly different emotional responses can be evoked by one dramatic setup.