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Thursday Night Cult Classics: 'The Big Lebowski'

The Big Lebowski, which airs Thursday, is the final installment of a special eight-week cult classics series at The Athena Cinema. Each movie will run on Thursdays at 7 p.m. For a full schedule, click here.

Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1999 crime comedy The Big Lebowski is a movie about a kidnapping and, well, a lot of other things. Told from the perspective of a lazy, unemployed bowler by the name of The Dude (Jeff Bridges), the plot follows the kidnapping of a young, promiscuous housewife of a millionaire businessman — the Big Lebowski himself — but becomes increasingly complicated as a series of potential conspiracies surrounding the crime begin to come to light. The Dude, who was drawn into the plot after being assaulted by two of the kidnappers looking for the aforementioned Lebowski (the two happen to share the same legal name), initially only seeks out the Big Lebowski to receive restitution for his soiled rug that “really tied the room together.” He is, however, dragged further into the plot after being called upon to deliver the ransom to the abductors, and from there stumbles cluelessly through a series of absurdly convoluted events with his best friend Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) a Vietnam War veteran and devout practicer of Judaism with a propensity for extreme violence and profanity.

The Big Lebowski is a perfect example of a film that in the hands of lesser talent — not only in the writing and directing departments, but with casting as well — would have undoubtedly and miserably failed. It is indeed an exercise in needless excess that seemingly wanders through the plot with the attention span of a third grader, but the Coen Brothers manage to pull it off gloriously through their uncanny ability to use comic relief to distract from the elaborate plot. In a movie with less comedy, quotability, drug-induced musical numbers and unbelievable side plots, the initial convoluted kidnapping story would have been chalked up as incoherent and pretentiously self-involved, but the aforementioned qualities keep the film from taking itself too seriously — and consequently, it keeps viewers from taking it too seriously.

The other key driving force behind the film’s success is an over-the-top cast of characters that make much of the film’s dialogue-driven humor work to perfection. The often heated exchanges between The Dude and Walter — who work as natural foils to each other, as The Dude is laid back and reasonable, while Walter is irrationally angry and confrontational — provide some of the film’s biggest laughs, while the supporting cast also chimes in with a great deal of humor and charm. There is Donny, their bowling partner and perpetual third-wheel friend; Jesus, the metrosexual and philandering bowling rival to the three; Maude, the sexually explorative and free-spirited daughter of the Big Lebowski, as well as his tightly-wound assistant, Brandt; the three German nihilists that allegedly aided a porn producer, Jackie Treehorn, in kidnapping Lebowski’s wife; and the wise, onlooking cowboy played by Sam Elliott who narrates intermittently throughout the film. While the film’s style of situational humor may be in large part the product of the writing department, a lesser cast would have left many of the film’s funnier moments and lines of dialogue without a comedic pulse.

The Big Lebowski, from the acclaimed writing and directing duo of Joel and Ethan Coen, is not your standard, setup and punchline kind of comedy. It wins over viewers not with unoriginal gags and bad wordplay, but with complex character interaction and intentionally convoluted plotlines — it is, in spite of the surface-level stupidity, incredibly cerebral in nature. So, from the vault of underwhelming conclusions to cap mediocre reviews, uh, watch it.

Four and one-half stars (out of five).

@cleblewa31lead

rm203015@ohio.edu

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