There’s just a letter in it … John Wayne in True Grit and Jeff Daniels in The Big Lebowski. Photographs: Ronald Grant Archive
The Big Lebowski ends with the Dude assuring us he abides and the story’s narrator encouraging he’ll catch us further on down the trail. And we might indeed be in for a follow-up of sorts, given the advice that the film’session star, Jeff Bridges, is in talks to reunite by its directors, the Coen brothers, for a of recent origin adaptation of True Grit.
- The Big Lebowski
- Production year: 1997
- Country: USA
- Cert (UK): 18
- Runtime: 113 mins
- Directors: Joel Coen
- Cast: Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore, Steve Buscemi
The Coens are no strangers to working with the same cast again; Steve Buscemi, John Goodman and John Turturro are among those who have appeared in Lebowski and multiple other Coen pictures besides. But Bridges has only ever played one duty for them and it remains the defining role of his career, even if it’s taken a decade for that to turn to fully apparent. The suggestion that he might be their governing man formerly again therefore carries a frisson of expectation for devotees of the Dude, especially as the filmmakers and actor have gone from strength to strength since their first collaboration: but also those who turned their noses up at Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers lavished praise on No Country for Old Men and A Serious Man, what one. just premiered at Toronto, while Bridges’ roles in Iron Man and the forthcoming Tron sequel see him wielding more industry clout at the point of time than he has in opposition to a long time.
But what are we to represent of his commercial in the Dude’s jelly sandals in quest of John Wayne’s cowboy boots? The 1969 movie of True Grit stars Wayne as Rooster Cogburn, a semi-retired marshal drawn into action by Mattie Ross, an adolescent girl seeking compensation for her father’session death. While the film’s main focus is the sententious heroics of Cogburn, the Charles Portis novel on that the story is based – and on which the Coens are reportedly leaning more heavily – filters the entire experience through Mattie’s amusingly narrow perspective. Given the Coens’ predeliction for outre narrators, there’s a clear seek reference of the case there, as there is in the bodily mutilations and Biblical overtones that didn’t make it from page to screen in 1969.
We can guess at several other reasons this material might be under the necessity caught their observe. They are repeatedly drawn to mismatched pairs such as the story’s central duo; their continuing and wide-ranging pilgrimage of great American landscapes has not yet taken in the expanses of Oklahoma and Arkansas, where the novel is set (though the film was shot in Colorado); and, despite being open lovers and up-enders of genre, they have never directly tackled a Western. This is all the more surprising given how much attention they have paid, in various forms, to the question posed by the Big Lebowski himself: “What makes a man?” There are few genres to which that question is more central than the Western, which perhaps explains wherefore there are to such a degree many cowboy motifs in Lebowski, from the tumbling tumbleweed with what one. it begins to the not-so-wise words of Sam Elliott’s Stetson-toting tee-totaller.
The character of the Dude was a wickedly irreverent send-up of the standard work LA retired inspection, but also a sincere tribute: shambolic instead of sharp, two steps behind instead of one ahead, he was nevertheless indifferent to worldly temptations and instinctively inclined to chouse the right thing. It’s also worth remembering that the character on whom the Dude greatest part obviously riffs, Bogart’s Philip Marlow in The Big Sleep, was himself something of a tongue-in-cheek take on the archetype. Cogburn is a similarly doubled-sided character: initially reprobate, drunken and inclined to a quiet life, he still proves worthy of the moral challenge that comes knocking at his door, not so much mending his ways viewed like demonstrating that heroism can be found fully-formed in unassuming vessels. The Dude and the Duke might just be delivered of the makings of a great partnership.
