The Dude Abides
The brothers Coen won a Best Picture Oscar a couple of weeks ago for No Country for Old Men. It’s an entertaining enough picture, though if it were up to me I’d have given the nod to There Will Be Blood. I’m not here to make a claim about which one of them is better though, I enjoyed them both; I just think that you really can’t tell which movie was the best one for any given year until some time has passed. Ten years from now, which catch phrase will still echo in popular culture, the one about the milkshake or the one about the coin flip? Maybe neither one will be remembered by anyone but film geeks, who knows? There is another movie that clearly has stood that test of time though and while I missed the actual anniversary by a week owing to the March 4 primaries and the end of The Wire, it deserves to be marked. I’m speaking, of course, of The Big Lebowski.
Ten years on Lebowski abides. Most movies don’t age well, the context for them fades, the effects lose their luster, the plot and characters don’t speak to modern audiences, etcetera. This is especially true of comedies. Well crafted jokes are finely tuned instruments that speak to a very specific time and place and as the world changes from year to year they lose their precision. Through ten years though, Lebowski remains dead-on. It helps that it was set in the past, even by 1998 standards the Dude’s 1990 bag-phone looks ridiculous, but whatever the ultimate reasons for its longevity it’s a remarkable accomplishment.
It didn’t get much respect when it came out, ranking a mere #96 at the domestic box office for 1998 and failing to garner a single Oscar or Golden Globe nomination. Take a look at the top grossing movies of 1998, there are four comedies in the top ten. Three of them were off the shelf star vehicles, The Waterboy (#5), Doctor Doolittle (#6) and Patch Adams (#10), and the fourth was a directorial star vehicle, the Farrelly brother’s There’s Something About Mary (#3). That year’s best picture winner, Shakespeare in Love, was also a comedy, albeit of the higher brow variety, and came in at #18 overall. Do any of those movies still garner the love of fans like Lebowski does? Do any of those movies sit on as many DVD shelves as Lebowski? Will as many people understand a quote or a reference to one of them? I think not.
After ten years The Big Lebowski has stood up impeccably, the jokes still work and the effects haven’t dulled. Attend a screening of it sometime, even outside of Los Angeles they’re still held with some frequency, half the audience probably wasn’t old enough to enjoy it when it first came out. Will teenagers ten years from now, reaching that age where they begin to really enjoy adult movies, embrace Lebowski with the same fervor? I don’t know, but if there was ever a comedy that can continue to draw new fans even long after the fact it’s this one.
I don’t have any real point beyond stating the obvious: ten years on Lebowski remains as funny as it was when I first saw it in the theater. It just seems wrong to let the tenth anniversary of such a film pass without comment. And while I’d ordinarily think to close with a quote, or a reference or a rehash of a famous scene, in this instance there really are just too many to choose from and that’s about the best compliment I can give to a movie.
