Viking Night: The Big Lebowski
By Bruce Hall
March 8, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com

Can you imagine me winning an Academy Award?
Most consumers have no problem loving a huge budget blockbuster. Movies that are meant to appeal to the widest possible audience usually do just that. But some films have a narrower vision, or simply contain more complex meaning than meets the eye. They aren't always art, and they aren't always even very successful. But for a devoted and eccentric few, they're the best entertainment money can buy. Once, beginning with Erik the Viking, a group of dedicated irregulars gathered weekly in a dingy dorm room to watch these films and discuss how what pleases the few might also appeal to the many. Time has separated the others in those discussions so that I alone remain to ponder the wider significance of cult cinema. But while the room is cleaner and I no longer have to skip class to do it, I still think of my far off friends whenever I hold Viking Night.

2010 was a good time to be Jeff Bridges. He started the year off with an Academy Award and ended it by reprising his role as Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski in Tron: Legacy. Well, he wasn’t really playing The Dude, but it sure felt that way. Or maybe despite his distinguished body of work one actor has become so closely associated with one character by his fans that every time they see Jeff Bridges, they see The Dude. Maybe it’s the way Bridges tends to morph into the characters he plays, you can’t tell where one begins and the other ends. The Dude was not in either Tron movie but Jeff Bridges was, and he’s every bit as interesting and eccentric as the character he made famous.

But The Dude is more than just a character – he’s the most unlikely of heroes from what is among the most revered of all cult movies. It’s a story filled with well regarded actors and memorable lines, cursed with a record of box office failure and worshipped by a narrow cross section of people as devoted as any Trekkie or Twihard. Add to that the involvement of movie geek icons Joel and Ethan Coen, and you get The Big Lebowski. It’s a movie so quirky-but-somehow-entertaining it’s almost guaranteed to please only the strangest people you know. It’s one of those flicks you’ve heard people gush about but the first time you see it, the appeal will probably go right over your head. So who is The Dude, and why will his name be on Jeff Bridges’ tombstone? Read on my friend, and abide in what follows.

When you think about The Big Lebowski, think about a noir detective thriller mixed with a zany Three’s Company mistaken identity subplot. If that’s not clear enough, think about an unemployed stoner, a traumatized war veteran with anger issues, and Steve Buscemi playing Mister Pink with 12 concussions. These are your heroes. Then there is the Big Lebowski himself (David Huddleston), an eccentric millionaire who happens to share the same legal name as The Dude (Jeff Bridges). There’s Lebowski’s wife Bunny (Tara Reid. Yes. Tara Reid). She is a nymphomaniac porn starlet four decades her husband’s junior who hangs around with a group of German nihilists pulled right out of a Saturday Night Live sketch.

There’s Lebowski’s daughter Maude (Julianne Moore), an offbeat painter with a dodgy British accent and an obsession with her own reproductive organs. And let’s not forget Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara), Bunny’s blue movie boss and apparently, pimp. It seems that Bunny owes Jackie money; Jackie sends his two best meatheads after her husband, Jeff Lebowski. The only problem is they drop the hammer on the wrong Lebowski. The Dude, as he prefers to be called, spends his free time – which is to say all of it – bowling with friends, smoking weed and drinking White Russians. And it is after a night of such revelry that The Dude is visited upon by Treehorn’s goon squad.

After trashing The Dude’s apartment and defiling his living room rug, the goons realize they have the wrong man and leave. But The Dude cannot abide such injustice and pays Lebowski a visit, hoping for a new rug. Unable to get Lebowski to see it his way, The Dude improvises a solution that sets in motion a chain of events which can only happen in a Cohen Brothers movie. Unlikely characters are mismatched with situations that are either far over their heads or far beneath their capacity to accept. And in the end, one character’s intelligence lets him down just as another’s lack of it achieves the same results.

The Coens clearly want us to believe that no matter our station in life we’re fundamentally no different than anyone else; we’re all at the same table playing from the same deck of cards. Yet while just as innately flawed as the Big Guy, due to greater purity of heart the Little Guy will always come out on top. There’s something naively Homeric about that, and it’s a theme that runs through most of the Coens' work. Theirs is a colorful style of storytelling meant to convey simple concepts through vast exaggeration. The problem is that when you combine Bronze Age messages with Space Age delivery, you end up stretching too little skin over too much bone. The theme I get from Lebowski is that all men possess the same capacity to do good or harm – therefore you should never trust someone too much, or too little. That’s a neat point, but the material is so needlessly dense that you have to see it five or six times to truly appreciate it. It’s a great way to earn a cult following, not so much if you want people to keep letting you make movies.

But the Coens do keep making movies and as I’ve said before, they’re only getting better. The Big Lebowski is from a time when my biggest pleasure with AND gripe about the Coens was that characters were often more memorable than stories. Yet it’s this very liability that has become the brothers’ bread and butter. Jeff Bridges’ portrayal of the Dude is a textbook study in slacker perfection. Sure, he smokes pot at eight in the morning, walks around in pajamas all day and never seems to have a job. But he isn’t a bad guy; he’s as harmless as a gnat and loyal as a puppy. His best friend Walter (John Goodman) is the sort of stereotype you hear a lot about, but one that few movies touch on screen. A badly shell shocked Vietnam Veteran, Walter is a red state, pistol packing wing nut with paranoid tendencies and a head full of aggression. But behind his tirades is a sad vulnerability that despite his hard edge, keeps his friends from walking away.

Lebowski is a proud man with a lot of money who’s so busy trying to protect what he has that he never gets around to enjoying it. He’s no less pathetic than Walter, despite his pedigree. Some fare better than others, but every character in this story is just a poor schmuck trapped in a comedy of errors. It’s a terrible mess that started with a rug and each time someone tries to fix it, things get worse because they’re reacting to things that aren’t really there. This results in kidnapping, embezzlement, girls in small bikinis, guys with big guns, bowling, one cardiac arrest and someone loses an ear.

But what’s missing is real momentum. The Big Lebowski is very well cast and it’s filled with colorful characters, humorous situations and dialogue so subtly amusing you don’t even realize how funny it is until hours later. But this is true of any Coen film. What’s equally true is that these characters bounce around the story like pinballs, providing lots of light and sound and color but little real activity. And if you’ve ever played pinball you know that at the end of the game no matter how you played, the balls end up right back where they started. It was a lot of fun but if you think about it, was little more than a pointless activity that happens to improve your skill at pointless activities. At the end of The Big Lebowski it feels much the same. Nobody’s problems really get solved, but nobody’s life really changes because of it, either.

Maybe the key to enjoying The Big Lebowski can be found in The Dude’s approach to life in general. Don’t try to follow what’s going on. You will naturally absorb at your own pace whatever it is you need to know. Hang out, fix yourself a drink and have a good time watching everyone else have a bad time. Laugh when you feel you should and if you walk away from it with nothing, that’s okay too because at least it was something to do. Make the right choice, make the wrong choice, but just make a choice. Like a good game of pinball it doesn’t have to mean anything after it’s over but the memories should always make you smile. And I just can’t think of The Big Lebowski without smiling. The Dude abides.