The Big Lebowski.

Robert Benton's Twilight gives us a new subgenre: geriatric film noir. Hoary plot maneuvers, leisurely pacing, mellow photography (sunset pinks dominate), a cast of magnificently aging stars, and a measure of sarcasm and violence visited on overeager young punks by a seventy-three-year-old but still-fit Paul Newman, all ensure that this movie will be a staple in retirement home video collections for decades to come. (Benton's The Late Show also had an aging detective-hero in Art Carney, but that was a screwball comedy, not noir.)

Harrry Ross, ex-cop, ex-private eye, and ex-alcoholic, is living on the dwindling bounty of two ex-movie stars, the cancer-ridden Jack Ames and his still seductive wife, Catherine, for whom Harry carries a torch that he keeps burning in the Ames household where he functions as a sort of superannuated houseboy. A shady errand assigned to Harry by the husband revives old speculations that Jack murdered Catherine's first husband decades earlier. Harry moves closer and closer to the truth, striving to tell the guilty from the innocent and hoping that Catherine falls into the latter category.

The unfolding of this story is one long stroll down film noir memory lane. Ah yes, there goes the hero inching forward through the seedy apartment when no one answers his knock, and guess what he's going to find in the back room? You got it. And when Ross smashes a punk's face down on top of a bar, does the bartender rush over to ask the patrons to go a little easier on the appurtenances or does he just mumble a nervous "Everything all right over there?" and quickly look away so that Harry can then move on to choke holds? Right again! And yes, there is that "This is a lousy way to make a living" speech that all detectives have to make in the penultimate reel, immediately followed by the plea to the police lieutenant," Just give me twenty-four hours to find the killers," a request granted, of course, which leads to the final gunplay capped by the inevitable curtain speech by our hero: "You rich people are capable of anything." If you've read enough Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, why would you pay eight dollars to see this movie? Why couldn't you stay at home, write it yourself, and find an agent to sell it?

Actually, there are four reasons to see Twilight: Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Gene Hackman, James Garner. I won't say that any of them are operating at peak performance (as Newman was in his last movie, Nobody's Fool), but they are awfully good. Hackman gives perhaps the most interesting performance as Jack Ames, making us understand how likable fatuous egomaniacs can sometimes be. Sarandon does the femme fatale number to perfection and even humanizes it enough to convince us that such a woman is capable of her own version of fidelity.

But in their scenes together, Newman and Garner inhabit the emotional center of the movie. These old gumshoes seem to embody the film's title but in completely different ways. Newman's Harry Ross is an aging urban man and a lifetime of frustration has left him tense, rattled, alert, bitter, yet still hopeful. The dinosaur as man of honor. Garner's Raymond Hope is an old, smart hillbilly who has made it in the big city; he's let himself go slack but knows where all the bodies are buried. A dragon sitting on a hoard of gold may fall asleep but his tail can still flick round and crack your head open.

When this sour romantic and this gloating realist get together, something happens to the two actors playing them. Star chemistry, yes, but it's more like a friendly duel called Let's See Who Can Underact the Other off the Screen. Newman flicks his gaze up, then down to the floor, thereby suggesting a lifetime of opportunities flubbed. Garner arches (ever so slightly) one eyebrow and calls all objective reality into question. Newman twists the corner of his mouth up a micrometer for a microsecond, lets it drop. Garner counters by doing something nonchalant with ice cubes in a glass. Newman then tries to give Garner a lesson in how putting a cigarette in the corner of the mouth can shade a banal line of dialogue into eloquence, but Garner trumps this with the sort of frozen grin that's more frightening than a volley of oaths. Newman leans against a car. Garner leans against a balcony railing. We all lean forward in our seats to catch the next quietly outrageous and character-revealing shtick.

Robert Benton's direction is as smooth and lithe as his script is arthritic. But it is his aging stars that turn this movie into a mellow pleasure.

The latest effort by Ethan and Joel Coen - but stop! To refer to a Coen movie as an "effort" is so utterly unhip. And inept. To begin again: the latest cinematic snicker or sneer or shrug by Hollywood's most coddled iconoclasts is The Big Lebowski. Encouraged by the relative coherence and humanity (relative, mind you) of the brothers' previous film, Fargo, I watched the opening reels of this one with a certain hopefulness. Tile initial situation held possibilities: a Reaganite billionaire named Lebowski hires - for reasons I won't go into - a piece of wreckage from sixties radicalism also named Lebowski, a.k.a. "the Dude," to be the bagman for the ransom of his supposedly kidnapped wife. Earlier, the rich L had sneered at the poor L as one of "the bums" (that is, counterculturalists) who "lose...will always lose." The stage seems set for the Dude not only to rescue the trophy wife but - as the representative of one decade taking revenge on the beneficiary of a later one - to turn the tables on his crass employer. (And, in the story's background, the Gulf War is being waged by Reagan's successor - political significance!)

Well, something roughly like that happens, but...I should have known better. A third of the way into the movie, the Coens are up to their old tricks and are betrayed by their old tics. Every character, including the hero, is a freak of some sort, so we care about none of them (though I must add that John Goodman gives a superb performance as a psychotic Viet vet). Every scene begins or ends or climaxes with a grotesque stunt, so our capacity for surprise soon shrinks. As the grotesqueries multiply and the scenery-chewing escalates, the laid-back hippy hero (though agreeably played by Jeff Bridges) soon goes the way of all neutrals surrounded by monsters: he's, dramatically speaking, marginalized, so that the story, no longer has an emotional center. Since nearly every plot twist is stupidly motivated, the audience stops following the story qua story and is reduced to watching Stupid Human Tricks.

It might be argued that the Coens weren't trying to tell a coherent detective story but were out to raise our expectations of one in order to satirically dismantle our expectations. To which I would answer: why? In 1973, Robert Altman did a superb demolition job on the hard-boiled detective genre with his The Long Goodbye, featuring a shambling version of Philip Marlowe confounded at every turn. But Altman had a vision: he was showing the last vestige of chivalry being undone by the physically sleek, fiscally hard-headed narcissists of Southern California, thereby both mocking and fulfilling Raymond Chandler's romance of solitary macho men walking down mean streets with honor.

The Coens have no such vision; they just despise everyone. And they are so delighted with their own filmmaking that they've forgotten they are supposed to delight us. Undergraduates going through their obligatory nihilistic phase may laugh in complicity with the movie, but their youth is their excuse. What can the Coens plead?

If Twilight is geriatric noir, Lebowski is slob noir, but not because the hero is a physical wreck. The slobbiness is in the storytelling.