The Dude abides. A bowling-alley film noir that flopped at release and has become one of cinema's most-quoted cult texts.
Jeffrey 'The Dude' Lebowski, an unemployed slacker in Los Angeles in 1991, comes home to find two thugs urinating on his rug. They have mistaken him for a different Jeffrey Lebowski — a wealthy older man with an absent wife. The Dude visits the wealthy Lebowski to ask for compensation for the rug. Within hours he is hired to handle a ransom payment for the wealthy Lebowski's kidnapped wife.
The case spirals. There are nihilists. There is a bowling tournament. There is The Dude's friend Walter Sobchak, a Vietnam veteran whose response to almost every situation is incommensurate with the situation. The film is a Raymond Chandler novel transposed onto stoners, and it is structured as one — almost everything that happens is either a red herring or a misunderstanding.
The Big Lebowski was a commercial disappointment on its 1998 release. The Coen brothers had just won Best Original Screenplay for Fargo two years earlier; Lebowski was perceived as a strange follow-up. It grossed $46m on a $15m budget — not a disaster, but well below studio expectations.
The film's afterlife is one of the great cult-film stories of the home-video era. Lebowski Fest, an annual gathering of fans organised since 2002 in Louisville, Kentucky, has become a multi-city event. Dudeism, a self-described 'slowest-growing religion in the world' based on The Dude's philosophy, claims over 600,000 ordained 'Dudeist priests'. The film is now widely treated as one of the Coens' two or three best.
Jeff Bridges has called The Dude the favourite role of his career. The performance is built almost entirely on Bridges's body language — the slouch, the loose-armed walk, the way he holds a White Russian. The Dude has barely an opinion about anything that happens to him; his core philosophical position is essentially 'this is bumming me out, man'.
John Goodman's Walter Sobchak is the film's structural counterweight and arguably its real protagonist. Walter is unable to encounter a situation without inserting his Vietnam veteran identity into it; he treats bowling-league rules as if they were Geneva Conventions; he is, in effect, the Coens' study of an American masculinity built entirely from postwar resentment. Goodman's performance is one of his career-defining ones.
Lebowski is the Coens' most quoted film by significant margin. 'The Dude abides.' 'Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.' 'You're out of your element, Donny.' 'Sometimes there's a man — I won't say a hero, because what's a hero?' The screenplay's looseness — extended digressions, almost-conversational rhythms, characters interrupting themselves — feels improvised but is in fact carefully written. The Coens have said they rewrote scenes repeatedly to find the right combination of cadence and absurdity.
Sam Elliott's Stranger, the film's intermittent narrator, exists partly to give the film's noir frame an explicit voice and partly to provide a counterweight to Walter's rage. The Stranger is the only character in the film who has resolved his relationship with American masculinity. Almost no one else has.