In 1997, the Coen brothers, indy mavericks for almost a decade, coming off the lacklustre response to their first big budget picture, The Hudsucker Proxy, decided to get back to basics with a ‘true’ crime tale of kidnapping and murder, one entitled Fargo.
The results were Oscar gold, with the brothers winning for Best Screenplay and Frances McDormand bagging a well-deserved Best Actress gong. How do you follow that? Well, if it ain't broke don’t fix it, so why not more spousal kidnapping?
The Big Lebowski is about a laid-back ex-roadie, Jeff Lebowski, AKA The Dude (Jeff Bridges) who gets mistaken for a multi-millionaire with the same name, has his favourite rug peeed on by home-invading nihilist thugs and sets out with his bowling buddies (John Goodman and Steve Buscemi), to get to the bottom of things. Ostensibly, it's a detective story, albeit one where the hero is an incompetent stoner who pretty much makes a total mess of things at every turn, but it's about so much more: art, bowling, nihilism, bowling, retribution, championship bowling, impotent male rage and Jesus. Not the Lord and Saviour one, but the alleged pedophile bowler one, Jesus Quintana, played by a scene-stealing John Turturro.
All the ingredients of a surefire hit, right? Lebowski did average business in the US, and played well overseas making three times its budget back. But its shelf life - always a sign of good art - has been phenomenal. When your film gets better and better with each viewing - and this is a movie that gives you something new pretty much every time - you know you’ve made something special, something that speaks to people, even, if you’re not saying much. It's all about how you say it. And it helps that the movie is pretty damn hilarious.
Its success on DVD and Blu-ray throughout the world brought a whole new handbook of quotes to the cult-movie lexicon: "That rug really tied the room together", "Shut the f**k up, Donny!", "Eight year olds, dude.", "Don't be fatuous, Jeffrey.", "Nobody f***s with the Jesus.", "I’m a brother shamus!", "Obviously, you’re not a golfer." and many, many more that cannot be published here due to their technicolour profanity. Then there's the cast, which features everybody from Julianne Moore and the late, great Phillip Seymour Hoffman to John Cassavetes regular Ben Gazarra to cult musicians Jimmy Dale Gilmore and Aimee Mann to future Sharknado star Tara Reid, all perfectly cast.
And then there's Sam Elliott, as the narrator.
As well has becoming one of the definitive cult films of the late twentieth century, Lebowski’s other legacy was the mid-career revival of Jeff Bridges. Though steadily employed, Bridges' filmography in the 1990s wasn't exactly peppered with hits - in fact his last film pre-Lebowski was a TV movie with his brother, Beau.
The Dude became his defining role, endearing one man’s meandering struggle to simply ‘abide’, no matter how baked he was and how incompetent his friends were. The path to awards wasn't far off, either; forging a firm friendship with the Coens, The Dude - I mean Bridges - played Rooster Cogburn in their 2010 version of True Grit, earning himself an Oscar nod a year after actually winning one for Crazy Heart. Had he not won for the latter, they would’ve given it to him for the former.
So where’s the Big Lebowski sequel? The success of this particular movie in the Coen’s oeuvre has bemused the brothers themselves, to the point that their eyes would roll like bowling balls whenever fans would quote the dialogue at them in the street. But Jesus was having none of it, and went out and made his own. John Turturro’s Jesus Quintana was a character created by Turturro on stage and written into the movie by the Coens. With their blessing, Jesus will return in Going Places later this year - it's a loose remake of a '70s French film by Bertrand Blier. So we may not get that sequel, but may instead end up with something very popular these days: an extended Lebowski cinematic universe.
One thing’s for sure: twenty years later ‘Jesus’ lives, and ‘The Dude’ abides like never before.
Dublin's Light House Cinema is hosting a Big Lebowski 20th Anniversary Screening and Party on Saturday, September 22 - more details here.
