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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.

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