I found a used copy of the movie Cutter's Way for only three bucks yesterday! That's the one with Jeff Bridges playing an L.A. slacker who becomes embroiled in some shady going-on, which only become worse when he turns to his unstable 'Nam-vet buddy for help.
Yes, if you're a Big Lebowski fan, you'll realize this is one of the movies that inspired Joel and Ethan Coen to make their giddy masterpiece. Cutter's Way is a very different movie, of course--for one thing, it's relentlessly grim--but thematically, it's surprisingly similar, and both films are immeasurably aided by great central performances from Jeff Bridges.
Is Bridges the most underrated actor of the last thirty years? He's started getting late career love lately, prompted in no small part by Lebowski's legions of fans, but he's still not regarded with the same sense of awe critics still inexplicably award the likes of Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino.
I must say, the prevailing attitude that those two represent some untouched level of greatness in American acting baffles me. Take DeNiro, for instance. Yeah, I'll give you Taxi Driver. That goes without saying. But among his other celebrated collaborations with Martin Scorsese, only New York, New York and The King Of Comedy strike me as truly exemplary work. Mean Streets is carried by Harvey Keitel's fine performance, with DeNiro offering mostly a series of tiresome Method acting exercises in place of a fully rounded character. Yeah, he's good in Raging Bull, but with no shading to his characterization, his technically excellent performance becomes grating. His work in other Scorsese films are a joke--Casino is a pretty good movie, but the whole conception of his character is that he's a Jew working for a bunch of Italian mobsters, and DeNiro is about as Jewish as cannoli.
DeNiro's non-Scorsese movies mostly fail to impress. He did great work for Bernardo Bertolucci (1900) and Sergio Leone (Once Upon A Time In America), but that was all in the seventies and early eighties. After that, there's almost nothing in his filmography worth taking seriously. Awakenings? The Fan? Flawless? Did America's Greatest Actor bother reading these scripts? Did he think collaborations with the likes of Tony Scott and Joel Schumacher would lead to good work? Is this a body or work to be regarded with any sort of reverence? (I haven't even mentioned Showtime or, God help us, Meet The Fockers. Those are as bad as movies get.)
Pacino's career followed a very similar arc. Sure, you've got to give it up for The Godfather pictures and Dog Day Afternoon. I'm a big admirer of his early efforts The Panic In Needle Park and Scarecrow, and one of the few people who really likes William Friedkin's Cruising, and Pacino's work in all of those is fearlessly committed. He's turned into a bit of a ham in recent years, which is fine when he finds a proper vehicle for his over-the-top tendencies (Scarface or The Devil's Advocate), but good luck to anyone forced to sit through Scent Of A Woman or City Hall. Unlike DeNiro, Pacino could still do good work in worthy projects throughout the eighties and nineties--Glengarry Glen Ross, Donnie Brasco, The Insider. But lately it's been nothing but a steady stream of embarrassments--Two For The Money, 88 Minutes and of all things, Gigli.
The point is, despite their reputations, DeNiro and Pacino have done surprisingly little of substance. Compare their body of work to what Jeff Bridges has done--there is no comparison. Bridges' first major role was in Peter Bogdanovich's tonally perfect The Last Picture Show, and he followed it up working with no less than John Huston in Fat City (an infinitely better boxing picture than Raging Bull, by the way). He never landed a truly iconic part like Travis Bickle or Michael Corleone, but he spent the seventies doing great work in some pretty good movies--The Last American Hero, Bad Company, Thunderbolt And Lightfoot, Hearts Of The West and Stay Hungry. Right there, he had a better body of work than DeNiro or Pacino have managed in their whole careers.
But unlike them, he didn't start getting lazy in the eighties and nineties. He continued seeking out fine roles in good movies like Starman, Tucker, American Heart, The Fisher King and of course, Cutter's Way and The Big Lebowski. Yeah, he made some bad stuff along the way, but those were mostly misfires, not reference=standard losers like Meet The Fockers or Gigli.
It's worth noting that Jeff Bridges' upcoming movie The Open Road is a character-based drama. Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino have a collaboration set for release, Righteous Kill, about cops chasing a serial killer. Bridges continues to look for opportunities to act, whereas DeNiro and Pacino decided to team up and say, Why bother?
