The Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint!

Rating: 10/10 (4 May 2006)

There's almost no point in commenting on "The Big Lebowski"-- there's no way of summing up exactly what makes this movie so tremendously entertaining to the people that get it, and there's no way of convincing the people that don't that they're just stark raving mad. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to say something here, as I've insisted on several occasions that friends and relations watch this film, and no one I've recommended it to has complained yet.
I have a theory, which is probably complete hooey, about the genesis of this film. For years, the Coen brothers had made well-reviewed films that were usually overlooked by the Academy. Once "Fargo" broke through and earned them their deserved degree of industry acclaim, the Coens had a degree of freedom they'd never really had before. So, when they went to make a film to follow up what was considered a masterpiece, they chose the silliest subject matter they could come up with-- a noir comedy starring a unemployed stoner named Jeffrey Lebowski, a business tycoon of the same name, a porn king, a feminist conceptual artist, a wayward young wife, a buddy who can never get a word in edgewise, a gang of German nihilists, and a best friend named Walter Sobchak, who doesn't so much have flashbacks to the Vietnam War as he simply refuses to acknowledge that the war ever ended. Oh, and I left out the bowling pederast named Jesus.
Never before, and never since, have the Coens made a film with this much sheer, unadulterated glee. As has been said many times in earlier comments, John Goodman's performance as Walter is an award-worthy amalgamation of loyalty, hyper-rationalism and homicidal rage. Jeff Bridges, as the unemployed Lebowski(he prefers "the Dude"), has never been funnier(the scene where he tries and fails to throw a cigarette out of his car window is especially brilliant) as he aimlessly navigates the Dude's way through a kidnapping plot that is anything but routine. The Coens pepper the script with some of the sharpest dialogue they've ever come up with, and they're fearless in simply following their storytelling instincts wherever they lead. Any film that includes a musical sequence set to Kenny Rogers and the Second Edition and features both Julianne Moore in a Viking costume and Saddam Hussein as a bowling-alley attendant has more than its share of guts.
Do my comments explain why this film has become the cult classic that it is? Of course not-- if I could write that well, I'd have written "The Big Lebowksi" myself. At one point, the film's narrator, a cowboy played by Sam Elliott(darn, left him out too) is trying to describe The Dude, and he says something like, "The Dude was...man, I lost my train of thought." It's ridiculous as narration, but it's also instructive-- this is an entire movie that quite often loses its train of thought. And it's all the richer for it.