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The clear progeny of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, itself a noir story filmed with detached air quotes, The Big Lebowski is both a love letter and complete deconstruction of the Raymond Chandler style of dense, incomprehensible crime story. Oh, it’s also a merrily sardonic film filled to the brim with quotable dialog and one of the greatest performances of Jeff Bridges’ career, maybe the definitive performance. It’s also one of the densest films the Coen Brothers have made thus far, which is really saying something as many of their films are tricky, thick narratives.
As the cavalcade of colorful characters introduce themselves to the ever-shifting story and the story becomes increasingly circular, it becomes crystal clear that The Big Lebowski about mood and dialog above all else. The central mystery doesn’t matter, nor does the fact that the Dude is in over his head, but the attitude of the film is what ensnares you and keeps you going.
I mean, this is a film where the central character is a stoner who wears jellies, drinks White Russians, and uses bowling as his life’s great constant. It’s the Dude, or “Duderino, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing,” that abides and drives the ship here. As such, you needed an actor as comfortable with various styles of acting as Bridges. He of the seemingly endless range, he who appears as at ease in a Terry Gilliam ubran fantasia as he does in strict dramas and broad comedies, combines all of his different skills into one major role that is impossible to imagine under anyone else’s guiding hands.
Bridges appears to be effortlessly embodying the part with no visible acting involved. It’s a strange performance as he must inhabit a character that seemingly never registers much emotionally while also delivering various comedic bits with a straight face. He must play a character that is eternally in a fog but smart enough to game an ever-shifting number of players vying for his attention. It’s a tricky part but one that Bridges eases into from his first moment on screen until his last variation of “fuck it, let’s bowl.”
If the labyrinthine structure of The Big Lebowski reflects the basic architecture of a Raymond Chandler novel, then the Dude is Philip Marlowe as hippie burnout. Much like that private eye, the Dude operates by his own moral code and singular motivation, in this case revenge for his ruined rug that “really tied the room together.” His simplistic motivation spirals out into cadre of oddball characters that feel lifted from Chandler’s writings – rich businessman, free-spirit daughter, gold digger wife, cops on a familiar basis with the hero, the muscle putting the squeeze on the hero and his cohorts. They’re all present and accounted for and revealed to be ultimately unimportant.
The Dude always returns to a Zen-like state, typically by drinking a White Russian, sparking up, and doing a few roads of bowling with his friends. Those friends are Coen mainstays Steve Buscemi and John Goodman in what have to be the most memorable and vibrant supporting performances in a film littered with idiosyncratic characters. Goodman’s violatile Vietnam vet frequently calms himself down by declaring that they go back to bowling. This mantra is less an admission of defeat at any given point in the film and more a sort of spiritual regrouping, a centering process of sorts, a reminder that life can and will go on.
After all, the Dude abides.
