Review: The Big Lebowski (1998)

The Big Lebowski (1998)

Rated R for pervasive strong language, drug content, sexuality and brief violence

Score: 5 out of 5

The fact that The Big Lebowski isn't the defining film of Joel and Ethan Coen's careers speaks less to its own quality and more to the remarkably high bar the sibling team of writers and directors have set for themselves before and since. Despite being a box-office dud in its day, its unique blend of a crime caper, a noir mystery, a slacker comedy, and all manner of other influences both cinematic and psychedelic quickly helped it find its audience and build an enduring following on home video, quoted in fraternity houses and analyzed in philosophy 101. It tells the kind of story that the Coen Brothers specialize in, smart comedy about really stupid people who get into something way over their heads that turns out to be a lot simpler and dumber than it seems, taking classic film noir tropes and turning them upside-down. All of it is elevated by an all-star, larger-than-life cast of actors giving instantly memorable performances, crafting a world of ordinary and not-so-ordinary people that feels lived-in and authentic even as everything goes increasingly crazy. It's the kind of mystery where the protagonist figures everything out about thirty minutes in, instead being more interested in exploring the lives of its distinctive characters. Either way, it's a trip.

Set in the early '90s against the backdrop of the Gulf War, the film opens with a pot-smoking, middle-aged slacker named Jeffrey Lebowski, who prefers to go by simply "The Dude", getting his home raided one day by a pair of crooks on the orders of a porn producer named Jackie Treehorn, who beat him up and soil his nice rug. As it turns out, they got him mixed up with another Jeffrey Lebowski, the "Big" one, a millionaire philanthropist whose sexy trophy wife Bunny owes a ton of money to Jackie. The Dude, wanting some compensation for his ruined rug, heads to the Big Lebowski's house, which gets him and his bowling buddies, the hot-tempered Vietnam veteran Walter and the oblivious Donny, sucked into a bizarre tale that involves kidnapping, German nihilists, Jeffrey's artist daughter Maude, a punk kid from the suburbs named Larry, and more, all while an old cowboy who's seemingly wandered in from a Western narrates the tale.

This is not really the easiest movie to describe, in no small part because, like any good mystery or comedy, describing what happens ruins most of the fun. Like I said, it's a Coen Brothers movie, and the main appeal here isn't really the central mystery to start with. No, this is a hangout movie centered on The Dude, Walter, and Donny, a group of friends whose ordinary lives are thrown into disarray by unforeseen circumstances and then go even more askew thanks to their own blunders and stupidity. The central character, The Dude, is a guy who looks at first glance like he's the biggest idiot in the film. He's an aging hippie who took part in protests back in the '60s and has drifted through life ever since doing odd jobs in a world that's left him behind, as the Big Lebowski rather bluntly informs him the first time they meet. ("Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski! Condolences! The bums lost!") And yet, he's also the guy who manages to correctly guess what's really going on thirty minutes into the movie, and the only reason why it takes so long for him to do anything is because, well, just look at him. He's lazy, and even if he weren't, he doesn't really care either way, except for the fact that he's being pulled around by the people around him. The Dude may just be the most clear-eyed character in the entire movie, a guy whose philosophy of life is to let nothing get to him and just brush off what others have to say. It may have turned him into a layabout who's doing nothing with his life, but at the very least, he's happy and doesn't seem to be overburdened with problems in his life. It's no wonder that Julianne Moore's Maude Lebowski, arguably the only other character in the movie who seems to have her head on straight (and even she's a rather eccentric, smugly superior asshole), takes her own weird sort of liking to this guy, or that fans of the film have turned "Dudeism" into an actual spiritual code.

Everybody else, meanwhile, is going through life like they're in a completely different sort of movie, and most of the fun comes from watching them butt heads with one another. John Goodman's Walter, the hothead who can't stop going on about the war, is a Vietvet out of a prestige drama about a guy trying and failing to adjust to civilian life (though if you take the original screenplay as canon, it may just be stolen valor coming from a man with a few screws loose), one who winds up causing more problems than he solves. Peter Stormare, Torsten Voges, Flea, and Aimee Mann play a group of German nihilists who act like the hip, quirky protagonists of a contemporary Quentin Tarantino crime thriller as they try to exploit the situation, and simply make things worse for everybody. John Turturro's rival bowler The Jesus is the villain of a sports movie. Tara Reid's Bunny is someone lifted straight out a '70s porno who's directly responsible for the entire mess (noticing a trend here?). The only characters in the movie who aren't stupid are those who've either been dragged into it or, like Sam Elliott's mysterious narrator, are simply observing it all from afar, and yet, this is not a stupid movie. Rather, these characters, each brought to life by an amazing all-star cast, are stupid in their own unique ways, the jokes coming from how their unique brands of stupidity interact and form all manner of unique cocktails of mayhem. It's a movie where everything is constantly flying off the rails because none of these idiots know what they're doing, and just like The Dude, you're just along for the ride of a lifetime.

The Bottom Line

This is just, like, my opinion, man, but The Big Lebowski deserves its reputation as one of the greatest crime movies of a decade that had no shortage of them, a twisted tale of a bunch of idiots falling into a larger-than-life yet all-too-real maelstrom. See it, learn to quote it, and abide.