My “favorite Director” is, technically speaking, two directors: the brothers Ethan and Joel Coen. Although they are separate people, of course, who have talents distinct from one another, it is still the case that most cinephiles treat them as the single entity “Coen brothers.” It was hard to pass over many in the pantheon of Great Directors and pick the Coen brothers today, but the more I thought about it, the more confident I felt in my selection of them as my favorite. I’ve seen practically all of their films and can’t find a real “dud” among them. The Coen brothers’ films are quirky, weird, sometimes hilarious, quite often moving and, without exception, deeply existential. They are masterful storytellers, acute observers of the human animal, sensitive to both the comedy and the tragedy of the human situation, brutally honest about the great and small things we do with and to one another, equally adept at both hyperbole and nuance and, perhaps above all, their films evidence a real and abiding love of cinema and its history.
The Big Lebowski (1998) is not my favorite Coen brothers’ film, but it’s probably their best-known and the one most indicative of their work overall. For the record, my favorite Coen brothers’ films are No Country for Old Men (2007) and their remake of True Grit (2010), two of their darker films. What The Big Lebowski does, which is standard fare for many Coen brothers’ “comedies,” is take an almost unbelievably oddball character, put him in a hyperbolically oddball situation, surround him with an entourage of oddball sidekicks and antagonists, and then somehow– voila! the magic of cinema!— churn out a thoroughly, deeply and existentially “relatable” film. The great genius of Coen brothers’ movies is that they take the human being to be, first and foremost, a problem-solving animal. But no matter how epic or crazy or unbelievable the problems they give their characters to solve, the Coen brothers’ characters are only ever meant to solve the problem of themselves. Sometimes they succeed in working out that puzzle, though never completely, and sometimes they fail, though never completely. In either scenario, though, the audience leaves more puzzled with itself than when it came. And, I’d say, better for it.