The Coens make better “termite” than “white elephant” pictures (to borrow Manny Farber’s useful, if nevertheless overworn and somewhat dubious, dichotomy). The Big Lebowski is the kind of towering work that achieves greatness through its own effortless oddball-ness, the sort that can only emerges when an artist (or, in this case, artists) are motivated primarily by their own idiosyncratic amusement.
A Gen X Long Goodbye, this hazy, somewhat wistful take on American idiocy and confusion by way of the Bush Sr. era of politics, offers a farcical take on Chandler in which America just doesn’t make sense, man. (Burn After Reading is its acid-tongued cousin, a spiritual successor linked to the next phase of the Bush political dynasty.)
Its facetious, but oddly resonant, thesis is that in stupid, cruel, criminal times, there needs to be a constant, something to stabilize the chaos: someone with minimal ambition who will kick back and bowl and drink a White Russian.
The brilliance of Lebowski lies less in what it says than in how it carries itself, which is with the same unimpeachable casual exuberance and weirdness that runs through Bridges’ central performance. It’s the equivalent of a night out at your favorite neighborhood dive bar (which is to say a night spent reveling while in the eye of the American storm).
Caves of Altamira 