It’s not surprising that the Coens would produce the most memorable cult hit since The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). Ever since their film debut in 1984 with the tightly wrought Texas thriller Blood Simple, the Brothers Coen have been one of the most eclectic, original, and downright fascinating creative teams to work in modern Hollywood. Their films tend to be highly stylized, deeply embedded in a particular time and place, and populated by characters who are both bizarre and completely recognizable, usually caught up in highly unusual circumstances--which, in a nutshell, describes The Big Lebowski, although any attempt at summarizing the film’s many and varied pleasures risks minimizing what a profoundly wonderful achievement it is.

The action takes place in Los Angeles during the first Gulf War, and the hero (if you can call him that) is one Jeffrey Lebowski, who prefers to be referred to as “the Dude.” Played in one of those feats of immaculate casting by Jeff Bridges (who later reteamed with the Coens in True Grit), the Dude is shaggy, ragged, and always true to himself--bathrobe, cheap sunglasses, and all. He is an instantly memorable screen presence, a blissful concoction of faded ’60s radicalism and early ’90s slackerdom. Bridges’ performance is the kind that is too good to be nominated for an Oscar because it flies right under our radar with its lived-in perfection; he doesn’t so much play the Dude as he is the Dude, a simple man who has never quite made it out of his time and place and joined modern society He smokes a lot of pot, drinks a lot of White Russians, and is more than content to spend the majority of his time bowling with his two buddies, an amusingly psychotic Vietnam vet named Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) who is given to untimely ’Nam-inspired outbursts and an intense dedication to his adopted Judaism, and Donny (Steve Buscemi), one of those guys who always wants to be part of the conversation, but never quite makes it in.

The plot is set in motion when the Dude is confused with another Jeffrey Lebowski (David Huddleston), the latter being a millionaire philanthropist whose trophy wife, Bunny (Tara Reid), owes a lot of (bad) people a lot of money. Since the central storyline and all its accompanying side-plots and Coenesque diatribes are far too complicated to get into here (and largely beside the point, since the film is really about tone and character), suffice it to say that the Dude becomes deeply involved with the Big Lebowski when Bunny is kidnapped and the Dude is asked to be a courier for the ransom money. By the time all is said and done, Walter has become deeply involved, as has the Big Lebowski’s daughter Maude (Julianne Moore), an avant-garde performance artist, a pornographer named Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara), and a group of German nihilists led by Peter Stormare, who was so memorable as the silent but deadly kidnaper in Fargo. He doesn’t say much here either, but he makes the most of his screen time by turning the extremes of ideological conviction into absurdist farce.

In a sense, The Big Lebowski plays like an amalgam of all the Coen Brothers’ efforts up until that point. It shares their previous films’ strong sense of time and place, as well as their send-ups of movie genres and political and cultural ideologies. The very idea of pairing the Dude and Walter, the latter of whom probably would have shot the former during a peace demonstration in the ’60s, is testament to both the Coens’ twisted sense of humor and the way in which they find bizarre strands of humanity in the weirdest of scenarios (note the way Walter and the Dude get along by not getting along). As a whole, Lebowski’s closest cousin in the Coen universe is Raising Arizona (1987), with which it shares crazed caricatures, outlandish plot developments, surreal dream sequences (including a fantastic Busby Berkley-like dance number built around bowling and Vikings), and a general sense of cartoonish abandon that is nevertheless all of a piece. There is nothing serious about The Big Lebowski, but the Coens play it straight, which is why it has caught on with so many viewers: They dig its generosity and its genuineness.

The film was shot by veteran cinematographer Roger Deakins, in the fourth of his 11-and-counting collaborations with the Coens (they had previously worked on Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, and Fargo). Deakins always gives the Coens’ films a distinctive visual style, and here he does a brilliant job of capturing the bright colors of seedy Los Angeles in the early ’90s, whether that be the obnoxious purple polyester pant suit worn by the Dude’s bowling nemesis Jesus Quintana (John Turturro) or the strikingly manic dream sequences, one of which involves the dizzy spectacle of watching a strike from a bowling ball’s point of view. That particular shot is especially endemic of the Coens’ panache for turning our world inside out. Their talent lies not in their ability to reflect the norms of reality, but in the way they dig out the darkest and oddest corners of life, unearth them, and find the humor. In the end, the Coens will likely be most revered in cinematic circles for their more “serious” films, but those who appreciate their oddball sensibilities know that they will never make a movie better than The Big Lebowski.

Copyright ©2011 James Kendrick

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