Film Club Review

Film Club Review - The Big Labowski Film Review by Tyson Springfield-Stanley

What the dude man? The Cohen Brothers’ 1998 Crime Noir film ‘The Big Lebowski’ is one of the best anti-noir films I’ve ever seen. Breaking every detective trope and convention while they’re at it, this film succeeds where others fail in that being a small cast of loveable characters that fill their role perfectly. 

The Dude to start off is in theory one of the worst types of characters to be the main character, a lazy, pacifist, that is entirely reactionary. However, the Cohen Brothers manage to make him active in the story by making every character around Jeff Lebowski push The Dude into the plot. 

The side cast of the film is split into two halves’, the first half being a part of The Dude’s bowling crew with Donny and Walter. The second half split into The Big Lebowski’s underworld of politics, artists and criminals with Maude and Bunny. This not only sets a class divide between The Big Lebowski and The Dude, but it also highlights the differences in actions taken by the characters in those established social classes. The biggest example is Walter, not only acting as the opposite to The Dude being selfish, entitled, arrogant, and self-indulgent, Walter is a staple of consumerism to an extreme. So much so that the symbol of consumerism in this film being the bowling alley, Walter values it so much as to set conflict in motion with the main cast bowling and letting the thieves steal the car with the money. 

The naturalistic style of filmmaking is one of the core elements of the film, the acting always stays consistent with brief talks of nihilism and societal norms being shown dry comedic lens, mainly due to The Dude’s fish out of water presence in the plot. Walters mentions of Vietnam hammering in the masking that in the film is done to a comedic extent, but is shown in our society today through societal expectations and pressure in every social group in some way or another. 

Overall, it’s a staple of noir film in subverting tropes of the genre. So much so that I wouldn’t give it a rating. Formulate your own opinion and watch the film, don’t give it a score and talk about it!