The Big Lebowski

In 1991, slacker and bowler Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski, is attacked in his Los Angeles home by two enforcers for porn kingpin Jackie Treehorn, to whom a different Jeffrey Lebowski's wife owes money. One enforcer urinates on the Dude's rug before they realize they have the wrong man, and leave. After consulting his bowling partners, Walter Sobchak, a Vietnam veteran with PTSD, and Donny Kerabatsos, the Dude visits philanthropist Jeffrey Lebowski ("the big Lebowski"), requesting compensation for the rug. Lebowski refuses, but the Dude tricks his assistant Brandt into letting him take a similar rug from the mansion. Outside, he meets Lebowski's much younger trophy wife, Bunny, and her German nihilist friend, Uli. Soon afterward, Bunny is apparently kidnapped, and Lebowski hires the Dude to deliver a ransom. That night, another group of thugs ambushes the Dude, taking his replacement rug on behalf of Lebowski's daughter, Maude. Convinced the kidnap was a ruse by Bunny, Walter fakes the ransom drop. He and the Dude return to the bowling alley, leaving the briefcase of money in the Dude's car. While they are bowling, the car is stolen. The Dude is confronted by Lebowski, who has an envelope from the kidnappers containing a severed toe, supposedly Bunny's. Maude asks the Dude to help recover the money her father illegally withdrew from the family's charity foundation. The police recover the Dude's car. The briefcase is missing, but the Dude finds a sheet of homework, signed by a teenager named Larry Sellers. Walter learns that Larry is the son of Arthur Digby Sellers, a writer for the television show Branded, which Walter reveres. The Dude and Walter visit Larry but get no information from him. An enraged Walter destroys a Corvette he thinks is Larry's, only to find out it belongs to a neighbor, who vandalizes the Dude's car in retaliation. Treehorn's thugs abduct the Dude and bring him to the porn kingpin, who demands to know where Bunny is. The Dude says Bunny faked her kidnapping and Larry has the money, then passes out from a spiked drink Treehorn gave him. He is briefly arrested while wandering intoxicated in Malibu. On his way home, Bunny drives by, unnoticed by the Dude. Maude is waiting for the Dude at his home and has sex with him, wishing to become pregnant by a father with whom she will not have to interact. She tells the Dude that her father has no money of his own; he is dependent on an allowance that Maude gives him out of her inheritance from her late mother. The Dude and Walter confront Lebowski and find that Bunny has returned, having simply gone out of town. Bunny's nihilist friends took the opportunity to blackmail her husband, who in turn had tried to embezzle money from the family charity, blaming its disappearance on the blackmailers. The Dude believes the briefcase never contained any money. Walter suspects that Lebowski is faking his paralysis and lifts him out of his wheelchair, but his condition is real. Walter and the Dude are bowling when a rival bowler, Jesus Quintana, interrupts them. Walter had previously stated that he could not bowl on Saturdays since he is shomer Shabbos. Quintana implies that he does not believe Walter's excuse for not bowling on Saturday, threatens Walter and the Dude, and storms out. Outside the bowling alley, the nihilists set fire to the Dude's car and demand the ransom money. Walter fights them off, but Donny dies from a heart attack in the commotion. Unwilling to pay for an urn from the local crematorium, the Dude and Walter opt to put Donny's ashes in a coffee can instead. On a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Walter eulogizes Donny's death but ruins the moment by referring to his fallen comrades in Vietnam. As he scatters Donny's ashes, they are blown back onto the Dude by an updraft. As Walter tries to brush off the ashes, the Dude loses his temper and yells at him for everything that has happened. After Walter apologizes and consoles the Dude, the two go bowling. At the bowling alley, the Dude encounters the Stranger, the movie's narrator. Addressing the audience, the Stranger sums up the story, states that he remains inspired by the Dude, and reveals that Maude is pregnant with "a little Lebowski on the way." == Cast ==

Development The Dude is mostly inspired by Jeff Dowd, an American film producer and political activist the Coen brothers met while they were trying to find distribution for their first feature, Blood Simple. Dowd had been a member of the Seattle Seven, liked to drink white Russians, and was known as "The Dude". Also known as the Dude, Ganzer and his gang, typical Malibu surfers, served as inspiration as well for Milius's film Big Wednesday. "Big" Jeffrey Lebowski proved one of the most difficult roles to cast. The Coens contacted Robert Duvall (who did not like the script), Anthony Hopkins (who was not interested in playing an American), Gene Hackman (who was taking a break from acting) and Jack Nicholson. They then floated a long list of experienced actors as well as non-actor public figures such as Jerry Falwell and Norman Schwarzkopf, with Marlon Brando as their ideal, before deciding on David Huddleston within a month of filming. Charlize Theron was considered for the role of Bunny Lebowski. David Cross auditioned for the role of Brandt. According to Julianne Moore, the character of Maude was based on artist Carolee Schneemann, "who worked naked from a swing", and on Yoko Ono. Bridges was hesitant to play the role as he was worried that would be a bad example for his daughters, but his daughter Jessica convinced him to take it after a meeting. In preparation for his role, Bridges met Dowd but actually "drew on myself a lot from back in the Sixties and Seventies. I lived in a little place like that and did drugs, although I think I was a little more creative than the Dude." Joel Coen said that Jeff Bridges was upset there was no playback monitor so Bridges made them get a playback monitor at the end of the second week of production. The scenes in Jackie Treehorn's house were shot in the Sheats-Goldstein Residence, designed by John Lautner and built in 1963 in the Hollywood Hills. Deakins described the look of the fantasy scenes as being very crisp, monochromatic, and highly lit in order to afford greater depth of focus. However, with the Dude's apartment, Deakins said, "it's kind of seedy and the light's pretty nasty" with a grittier look. The visual bridge between these two different looks was how he photographed the night scenes. Instead of adopting the usual blue moonlight or blue street lamp look, he used an orange sodium-light effect. The Coen brothers shot much of the film with wide-angle lens because, according to Joel, it made it easier to hold focus for a greater depth and it made camera movements more dynamic. To achieve the point-of-view of a rolling bowling ball the Coen brothers mounted a camera "on something like a barbecue spit", according to Ethan, and then dollied it along the lane. The challenge for them was figuring out the relative speeds of the forward motion and the rotating motion. CGI was used to create the vantage point of the thumb hole in the bowling ball. Soundtrack The original score was composed by Carter Burwell, a veteran of all the Coen Brothers' films. The Big Lebowski (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) was released through Mercury Records on February 24, 1998, and was jointly produced by the Coens and the film's music supervisor T Bone Burnett. == Reception ==

Box office The Big Lebowski received its world premiere at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival on January 18, 1998, at the 1,300-capacity Eccles Theater. It was also screened at the 48th Berlin International Film Festival Critical response On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 80% based on 191 reviews, with an average score of 7.40/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "The Big Lebowskis shaggy dog story won't satisfy everybody, but those who abide will be treated to a rambling succession of comic delights, with Jeff Bridges' laconic performance really tying the movie together." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, has assigned the film a score of 71 out of 100 based on reviews from 46 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale. Many critics and audiences have likened the film to a modern Western, while many others dispute this, or liken it to a crime novel that revolves around mistaken identity plot devices. Todd McCarthy in Variety magazine wrote: "One of the film's indisputable triumphs is its soundtrack, which mixes Carter Burwell's original score with classic pop tunes and some fabulous covers." USA Today gave the film three out of four stars and felt that the Dude was "too passive a hero to sustain interest," but that there was "enough startling brilliance here to suggest that, just like the Dude, those smarty-pants Coens will abide." In his review for The Washington Post, Desson Howe praised the Coens and "their inspired, absurdist taste for weird, peculiar Americana – but a sort of neo-Americana that is entirely invented – the Coens have defined and mastered their own bizarre subgenre. No one does it like them and, it almost goes without saying, no one does it better." Janet Maslin praised Bridges' performance in her review for The New York Times: "Mr. Bridges finds a role so right for him that he seems never to have been anywhere else. Watch this performance to see shambling executed with nonchalant grace and a seemingly out-to-lunch character played with fine comic flair." Andrew Sarris, in his review for the New York Observer, wrote: "The result is a lot of laughs and a feeling of awe toward the craftsmanship involved. I doubt that there'll be anything else like it the rest of this year." In a five star review for Empire, Ian Nathan wrote: "For those who delight in the Coens' divinely abstract take on reality, this is pure nirvana" and "in a perfect world all movies would be made by the Coen brothers." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three stars out of four, saying The Big Lebowski was inferior to Fargo but nonetheless described it as "a genial, shambling comedy" which was "weirdly engaging." In a 2010 review, Ebert raised his original score to four stars out of four and added the film to his "Great Movies" canon. Ebert declared the film's plot was almost irrelevant, but the film was nonetheless a triumph of visual style and eccentric character performances anchored by Bridges' role: "The Dude is in a sense [Raymond Chandler's private investigator] Philip Marlowe — not in his energy or focus, but in the code he lives by." A more negative assessment came from Jonathan Rosenbaum, who wrote in the Chicago Reader: "To be sure, The Big Lebowski is packed with show-offy filmmaking and as a result is pretty entertaining. But insofar as it represents a moral position—and the Coens' relative styling of their figures invariably does—it's an elitist one, elevating salt-of-the-earth types like Bridges and Goodman ... over everyone else in the movie." Dave Kehr, in his review for the Daily News, criticized the film's premise as a "tired idea, and it produces an episodic, unstrung film." The Guardian criticized the film as "a bunch of ideas shoveled into a bag and allowed to spill out at random. The film is infuriating, and will win no prizes. But it does have some terrific jokes." == Legacy ==

Since its original release, The Big Lebowski has become a cult classic. Steve Palopoli wrote about the film's emerging cult status in July 2002. is a collection of 18 essays by different writers analyzing the movie's philosophical themes of nihilism, war and politics, money and materialism, idealism and morality, and the Dude as the philosopher's hero who struggles to live the good life in spite of the challenges he endures. Two species of African spider are named after the film and main character: Anelosimus biglebowski and Anelosimus dude, both described in 2006. Additionally, an extinct Permian conifer genus is named after the film in honor of its creators. The first species described within this genus in 2007 is based on 270-million-year-old plant fossils from Texas, and is called Lebowskia grandifolia. Entertainment Weekly ranked it 8th on their Funniest Movies of the Past 25 Years list. The Big Lebowski was voted as the 10th best film set in Los Angeles in the last 25 years by a group of Los Angeles Times writers and editors with two criteria: "The movie had to communicate some inherent truth about the L.A. experience, and only one film per director was allowed on the list." Nevertheless, John Turturro expressed interest in reprising his role as Jesus Quintana, and in 2014, he announced that he had requested permission to use the character. In August 2016, it was reported that Turturro would reprise his role as Jesus Quintana in The Jesus Rolls, a spin-off of The Big Lebowski, based on the 1974 French film Going Places, with Turturro starring, writing, and directing. It was released in 2020. The Coen brothers, although having granted Turturro the right to use the character, were not involved, and no other character from The Big Lebowski was featured in the film. Stella Artois commercial On January 24, 2019, Jeff Bridges posted a 5-second clip on Twitter with the statement: "Can't be living in the past, man. Stay tuned" and showing Bridges as the Dude, walking through a room as a tumbleweed rolls by. The clip was a teaser trailer for an ad during Super Bowl LIII which featured Bridges reprising the role of the Dude for a Stella Artois commercial. Use as social and political analysis The Big Lebowski has been interpreted from a variety of social and political perspectives by academics and pundits. In September 2008, Slate published an article that interpreted The Big Lebowski as a political critique. The center piece of this viewpoint was that Walter Sobchak is "a neocon," citing the film's references to then President George H. W. Bush and the first Gulf War. In That Rug Really Tied the Room Together, first published in 2001, Joseph Natoli argues that the Dude represents a counter narrative to the post-Reaganomic entrepreneurial rush for "return on investment" on display in such films as Jerry Maguire and Forrest Gump. The movie has been interpreted as carnivalesque critique of society, as an analysis on war and ethics, as a narrative on mass communication and US militarism and other issues. == Home media ==

Universal Studios Home Entertainment released a "Collector's Edition" DVD on October 18, 2005, with extra features that included an "introduction by Mortimer Young", "Jeff Bridges' Photography", "Making of The Big Lebowski", and "Production Notes". In addition, a limited-edition "Achiever's Edition Gift Set" also included The Big Lebowski Bowling Shammy Towel, four Collectible Coasters that included photographs and quotable lines from the film, and eight Exclusive Photo Cards from Jeff Bridges' personal collection. == See also ==