If anyone in Hollywood has quirkiness down to a science, it has to be the Coen brothers. From “Raising Arizona” to 1996’s Academy Award-winning “Fargo,” Joel and Ethan Coen have gradually instilled a vision of America in which normalcy is irrelevant and eccentricity the status quo, and this Friday they continue the onslaught with an all-new comedy, “The Big Lebowski.”Jeff Bridges (“White Squall”) plays Jeff Lebowski (a.k.a. “The Dude”), an unemployed, underachieving pothead who wants nothing more out of life than a few empty lanes at the local bowling alley and a nice area rug to “tie” his living room together. However, when two thugs break into his apartment, urinate on his rug, and demand money to pay the debts of a wife he doesn’t have, the Dude finds himself the unwitting victim of mistaken identity. Convinced the “Big” Lebowski in question is a local philanthropist of the same name – and spurred by the reactionary musings of his best friend, Walter (John Goodman) – the dude decides to pay his namesake a visit to settle the matter of his soiled rug.What follows is a sometimes convoluted, often funny, and always ironic look at the inherent polarity of social class in relation to the shifty underbelly of human nature that unites us all. When the wealthy Lebowski’s (David Huddleston) jailbait wife is kidnapped for a million dollar ransom, the Dude is called in to play the part of go-between to the tune of twenty grand. Desperately in need of some discretionary income, the Dude agrees to the Big Lebowski’s arrangement, only to have the opportunistic Walter ruin all hopes of a trouble-free transaction. Walter sees no point in giving a million dollars to a “goldbricking” wife who probably kidnapped herself, so he packs an uzi in hopes of finding the supposed “kidnappers” and forcing the truth out of them. Needless to say, the money quickly disappears and the Dude is left to navigate his own way through an unfamiliar world of decadence and upwardly-mobile weirdos in an effort to recover the missing cash.Playing a variation on the character he portrayed opposite Robin Williams in “The Fisher King,” Bridges provides the Dude with such a convincing amount of chemically-induced nuance and slacker disillusionment that he may be momentarily confused with that one true stoner friend we all seem to have. Likewise, Goodman’s Walter is played with such militant bravado that you can virtually smell the ethnocentric patriotism of “The Big Lebowski’s” Gulf War-era setting.As appealing as “The Big Lebowski” may be for its star-driven performance, one can’t help but notice the blatant redundancy of the film’s plot. The mistaken identity premise has been played out so many times in the past (“North by Northwest,” “The Shawshank Redemption”) that the Coen brothers’ script (which seems to borrow liberally from the Quentin Tarantino School of Ultra-heavy Dialogue) skirts a dangerous line between innovation and contrivance. In fact, were it not for Joel Coen’s wholly original direction and the infectious energy of the film’s central characters, “The Big Lebowski” would likely wind up one big gutter ball.Though certainly not a “Fargo” strike, “The Big Lebowski” is nonetheless a mildly amusing departure from the Hollywood norm that picks up a solid spare. While some audiences may feel alienated by the unconventional humor characteristic of most Coen films, “The Big Lebowski” offers performances and direction that effectively offset the formulaic and warrant a curious trip to the movie theater in the process.