Still abiding

‘The Big Lebowski’ didn’t always get the love

With the release of “The Big Lebowski” twenty years ago (on March 6, 1998, to be precise), the world met Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski. As the Coen brothers’ follow-up to their 1996 hit “Fargo,” “Lebowski” was greeted by comparatively amiable if nonplussed reviews and did just okay at the box office for coming off an Oscar-winning predecessor.

The loose story: In a case of mistaken identity, The Dude (Jeff Bridges), a White Russian-swilling, dope-smoking, amateur bowler, gets his rug peed on by a goon working for porn magnate Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara). Turns out there’s another Jeff Lebowski (David Huddleston), a business tycoon who lost his legs in Korea but “went out and achieved anyway!”

The Dude gets a meeting with the “Big” Lebowski to plead his case for a new rug and is rebuffed—at least until Lebowski’s philandering wife, Bunny (Tara Reid), is kidnapped, likely by Treehorn. He hires The Dude as his private detective (despite The Dude exhibiting no such skill) to get Bunny back.

At first sight I wasn’t impressed with its rambling, mostly unfunny, style-over-substance affectations and shopworn Raymond Chandler-inspired, noir-pastiche roots—though it does offer many moments of visual flair and a couple of solid performances from Bridges and John Goodman as The Dude’s bull-in-a-China-shop best friend, Walter Sobchak. It seemed like it was trying too hard.

But the proof of any film’s integrity is, after all, time. What’s special about many of the Coens’ early films (when everyone was still really excited about them) is they defy that wisdom; they tended to get crowds and critics to fall in love with them at first sight. Watch “Miller’s Crossing” or “Barton Fink” now, and the greatness everyone was excited about from the beginning is still apparent.

Thankfully, over the years, something drew me back to “Lebowski” for a second round. And a third. It got funnier. A lot funnier. The convoluted narrative, its references and interconnections, solidified into an easy-going organic complexity that rewards with repeat viewings, especially as the manic-deadpan rhythm of the jokes, quirk of its characters (with Goodman at his career-best, while John Turturro steals every scene), and weird set piece moments (the nihilist showdown, the marmot attack, the Kenny Rogers dream sequence) felt second-nature, like learning to drive a stick shift. Twenty years, and easily twice as many viewings later, I have a woodprint of The Dude on my wall.

That’s hardly the extent of its legacy. The cult of Lebowski are adorably legion now. If there is a moral here it’s that—sometimes, anyway—first impressions aren’t always everything.