A DUDE AND HIS RUG

Rating: Null/10 (27 March 2001)

SPOILERS, SPOILERS AND EVEN MORE SPOILERS! SO, WATCH OUT!

Basically, this movie is about a dude and his rug. Jeff Lebowski (who likes to be addressed as "The Dude") is an amiably indolent aging hipster that demands retribution when two strangers, mistaking him with another Lebowski, break into his apartment, push him around, and pee on his rug. When the other Lebowski, a gaseous old tycoon, refuses to do anything about the matter, The Dude simply helps himself with one of the old-timer's rug on his way out. That's the beginning of "The Big Lebowski", a sunny, shaggy-dog valentine for all the idlers and drifters, dreamers and non-conformists that languidly float around the periphery of the city of Los Angeles, the City of Dreams.
The movie was obviously written with Jeff Bridges in mind by Ethan and Joel Coen and, for once, their stylized off-the-wall pyrotechnics make better sense. Sporting an unkempt goatee and a pot belly, Bridges, the most unfussy of actors, disappears inside The Dude and gives the movie its own scruffy soul (he's in almost every scene), steering it effortlessly while he casually strolls across the screen. It's a classic comic performance.

The Coen Brothers are excellent kinetic filmmakers who, aware that film time and film space is geometrical, and that human nature is ridiculous, come out with prodigiously complex cosmic jokes, like two freak astrophysicists on an acid trip. Sometimes the ride is memorably amusing, as in "Fargo" and "Raising Arizona", and sometimes it is ornately mindbending, as in "Miller's Crossing" and "Barton Fink". On "The Big Lebowski" the joke is that the joke itself gets forgotten. Even the persian rug that The Dude snatches away is stolen midway through the film and barely ever gets mentioned again.
Apart from the rug, the movie features a tumbleweed, a good-ole-boy drawlin' narrator, bowling balls, two bowling pals, a bowling alley, a guy named "Jesus", the tycoon and his secretary, an abducted girl, a suitcase full of money, some Norwegian punks, a prattling nympho painter, a fat performing artist, an oily gangster, a mean policeman, an even meaner cab driver, a sawed-off toe, a bitten-out ear, an otter, a can full of ashes, and Jeff Bridges, who grounds this whacko comedy into the real world. Without him it would have turned into another abstract pattern.