‘The Big Lebowski’ movie review: The great human comedy
As the City of Angels flickers into view during the opening sequence of The Big Lebowski, we hear the creaking country tones of the Sons of the Pioneers. Their song, ‘Tumbling Tumbleweeds’, offers a brief musical lament to the dower reality pervading the distant city. It’s a dawning actuality that pertains to giving up the dream and acquiescing to the equanimity of aimlessness. The dogeared song searches for the last thread of the Old West’s grand ambition. And like the hardy botanical it sings of, it’s left tumbling eternally until it reaches the bosom of the Pacific Ocean, the definitive dead end.
In that pastiche alone we have the premise of the entire movie. This western outpost was once a land where cowboys roamed for gold and glory. Then, as the band name suggests, the sons of the brave souls were left looking for the scraps that remained. Their song soon faded as the city rose up. Thereafter, we hear a conversational ode of sorts to ‘The Dude’. The narrative voice sounds incongruous with the gaudy glow of the metropolis steadily sneaking closer to the prominence of the opening shot, and yet the man behind this old western timbre may be stupefied by Los Angeles but by the end, we see that the fellow it belongs to is no longer an outsider but rather a man assimilated into the story.
Initially, however, he serves to introduce us to one man. As Sam Elliott drawls out: “Sometimes there’s a man, well, he’s the man for his time and place, he fits right in there.” There was a time when that would’ve been the natives, and then the weathered and weary pioneers, then their desolate sons, followed by the halfway house cowboys like Sam Elliott’s ‘The Stranger’, then the Jeffrey Lebowski’s channelling their diminished Johnsons into egotistical harks back to the days when men were men, and then, finally, the dude and his realisation of what the cowboy dream actually was—the dream of being able to take ‘er easy.
In fact, this explains my own theory about the hybridising of bar-and-bear in the classic quip later on down the line. In Elliott’s own archaic terms, eating a bear or being eaten by a bear was the selfsame standing of life itself—the peak and trough was survival or bust. But in El Duderito’s day, you either celebrate a windfall that keeps your White Russians in credit for a while or else, you well, heck, lost my train of thought here…
So therein lies the film in the first few minutes. Either that or the Coen brothers just liked the song and dug Elliott’s style. But as someone who proudly calls The Big Lebowski their favourite film, I don’t really care if that’s all highfalutin hogwash because that’s the joy of this here story. The film entertains the possibility of depth in every irreverent detail. The fact it’s a stoner comedy that spawned its own religion is testimony to that. You can’t say that for any other film, and you certainly can’t say the reverse for religion—lord knows, there aren’t many belly-laughs in church. But The Big Lebowski provides both, it is an all-encompassing illumination of the human comedy, and it does it all in two hours with few minutes to spare for another cracking tune.
How, exactly, does the film stretch to endless corroborations that perhaps aren’t onscreen in that brief time? Simply put, it is fully realised in its entirety. Everything fits and everything ties together. From copying Bush’s decree on TV that “this aggression will not stand” to continually turning out the magnificent Bob Dylan track ‘The Man in Me’ from New Morning—the album that saw him turn away from politics and seek peace beyond circumstance. In fact, the only detail that I haven’t been able to make up a theory on is Jackie Treehorn’s sketch of a stickman with a giant spam javelin rearing up to his chin, but perhaps that’s just like life, there’s always something you can’t fathom.
And that is why the film is beloved beyond its brilliance—it is just like life in a way. Take our own hero, The Dude. No matter how many times I watch it, in the interim I always remember him as cooler and calmer than he ever is on screen. Lesser writers and directors would’ve worried about this. They would’ve thought, ‘Hold on, this guy is meant to be the uber-laidback embodiment of a dreamless, meandering deadbeat, we can’t have him shouting and screaming all the time about money and his manhood’. But screaming is sometimes fitting when a poor girl’s life is on the line, even Buddha would flip having Walter as a sidekick. All the while the message still shines through that all he wants is his rug back—a rug that brings harmony to his housebroken domicile.
And that just about wraps her up folks. The film’s plot is almost redundant to go into, not least because it’s a classic bag of cash tale. It’s more about the gutters and strikes of the world, and the fight to find harmony in this hectic modern existence. It might not always come together and innocent bystanders like Theodore Donald Kerabatsos (with his previously unmentioned penchant for surfing) might cruelly get tangled up in it along the way, but at least it’s a good laugh. And in a world where tragedy is inevitable, hell, it’s almost necessary in fact, comedy is just about the only thing that adds meaning to it—it takes the edge off like a tasty beverage, oils ‘er up, and keeps the whole darn thing perpetuating itself.
