It started as a pretty funny stoner movie that I watched on video some night. Then it became the default movie to watch when I couldn't think of anything else to put on. The more I watched it, the richer it became: eventually, I smiled admiringly at every nuance. Now, after several years and dozens of viewings, it is my favorite movie, the one I'm most likely to put on when I want to hang out with old friends. It's also one of the hardest to write about: how do you explain why you love your parents or cheese or sex? I love it because it is The Big Lebowski.
Detractors call it a narrative mess, a sprawling confusion with no plot and little to show for itself outside of the occasional laugh. I gaze at them in wonder, in fear, unsure whether they have seen the same movie. It has a plot, which is structured as an homage to 1940s film noirs such as the dazzling The Big Sleep, with its plot so fragmented that the writer, Raymond Chandler, reportedly admitted that he couldn't figure it out. Those noirs pitted a resourceful regular guy against a seemingly endless array of bad guys, interested parties, corrupt cops, bimbos, mysterious women, and assorted other characters. The main character had to solve a mystery, the solution of which was never as important or as interesting as the act of investigation and the personages he ran into along the way.
In this film, the Coen brothers reimagine that structure in their own inimitable way, by making the main character and most of the supporting cast a bunch of incompetents. Their hero, Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski, is among the most terminally laid-back, hapless, helpless, and clueless lead characters in film history. He bumbles through the film in a haze of pot smoke and White Russians; the times he accomplishes anything through his own initiative can be counted on one or two fingers. Things just happen to him, and the fact that he arrives at something approaching a solution to the film's mysteries is miraculous. Jeff Bridges, who is in every scene but one or two, plays The Dude in one of the great comedic performances of all time. We first meet him as he is introduced in a rambling voiceover, because this kind of movie needs a narrator. He is introduced as "a lazy man...quite possibly the laziest in Los Angeles county, which would place him high in the runnin' for laziest worldwide." He's shopping for half and half in a bathrobe; he writes a check for his sixty-nine cent purchase, and it will probably bounce.
He returns to his apartment, where, in a colossal case of mistaken identity, two thugs, thinking that he's a wealthy investor, accost him for money owed to a major pornographer by the other Jeff Lebowski's wayward wife Bunny. On the way out, one of them pees on his rug, which "really tied the room together." On the advice of his obnoxious bowling partner Walter Sobchek (John Goodman), he approaches The Big Lebowski (David Huddleston), a wealthy paraplegic, for a replacement rug. He's dismissed with a tirade of insults, but Lebowski calls him back soon afterwards because his beloved wife, the bimbo Bunny (Tara Reid), has been kidnapped. The Big Lebowski wants him to act as a courier, thinking that the rug-pissers might have something to do with it. This embroils The Dude, and sometimes Walter, in a web of intrigue that includes pornographers, fascist cops ("Keep your gold-bricking ### out of my beach community!"), teenage car thieves, angry German nihilists ("We believe in no-zhing!"), amphibious rodents, hyperfeminist modern artists, and bowling. Lots of bowling.
Perhaps the complaints about the lack of a plot stem from the fact that the film takes its time in wandering from setpiece to setpiece, and it's not above sitting back to share a throwaway scene or two. Each scene is an absurdist miracle. There's Walter's bowling alley showdown with Smokey (country legend Jimmy Dale Gilmore) over whether Smokey's foot went over the line. There's the encounter with The Jesus (John Turturro), an outlandish pedophile bowler dressed in purple spandex. There's the dropoff of the ransom money, which Walter complicates with an Uzi and his undies. There's The Dude's visit to the home of Maude Lebowski (Julianne Moore), the daughter of the Big Lebowski, who doesn't believe the kidnapping story. And on and on and on. "Throwaway" is the wrong term, since there are no scenes in this film that are disposable.
There also aren't any uninteresting characters in the film. The key to that is the Coens' dialog, which sounds like nobody else's. In many films, the dialog sounds like the same person talking through many mouths, but here, just about everyone with a speaking part has a unique way of speaking. The Dude's aphasic meanderings; Walter's staccato delivery that relates everything to Vietnam; Steve Buscemi's bewildered good nature; Maude Lebowski's oddly metered patter ("And how proud we are of all of them."); pornographer Ben Gazzara's smarmy glad-handing; the obsequious Philip Seymour Hoffman as The Big Lebowski's assistant—even relatively minor characters, like Mike Gomez as the cop in the impound yard ("They got us working in shifts!"), are distinctive.
Every scene is my favorite, but there are a few that stand out. The best "small" scene—a scene that would be considered a throwaway in a lesser movie—is The Dude's attempt to report his car stolen. What makes the scene is the nearly silent reaction of the older black cop as he surveys The Dude's drug-paraphernalia-littered coffee table; meanwhile, The Dude attempts to include the cash-filled briefcase in the theft report:
The Dude: Oh, uh, yeah, uh... a tape deck, some Creedence tapes, and there was a, uh... uh, my briefcase.
Young Cop: In the briefcase?
The Dude: Uh, uh, papers, um, just papers, uh, you know, uh, my papers, business papers.
Young Cop: And what do you do, sir?
The Dude: I'm unemployed.
This is the most succinct demonstration of the film's charm: the elaborate, wordy setup to a punchline that you can see coming, but that is nonetheless hilarious because of the actors' delivery. It's the actors that make this film: without the perfect casting—many of the parts were written with these specific actors in mind—and without their perfect comic timing, it wouldn't work. But it does work, every minute. With sly references to movies as varied as 42nd Street and The Long Goodbye, this is both a celebration of cinema and one of the best comedies ever made.