The Big Lebowski Review

The premise is a joke about genre: take the Chandler private eye plot, with its heiress, its nihilists and its incomprehensible chain of favors, and hand it to a man who wants nothing except his rug back. Because the Dude has no ambition, the mystery cannot pull him, so the film runs on digression instead of momentum, which is exactly why the plot summary reads as incoherent while the experience does not. Jeff Bridges built an entire comic register out of a mumble and a cardigan.

John Goodman's Walter is the actual engine, a Vietnam grievance in bowling shoes who escalates every situation past repair, and the Shabbos argument and the ashes at the cliff are two of the best-written comic scenes of the decade. Roger Deakins shoots the lanes with deep-focus grandeur and the dream sequences as full Busby Berkeley pastiche. The plotting is deliberately slack, and a few strands exist mostly as texture rather than story. Rewatchability is the grade here, and it is enormous.