Bowling balls, toilet bowls and John Goodman’s crew-cutted head are the main round objects in this stoner comedy about a dude — The Dude (Jeff Bridges), a creaky relic from 60s politics and drug love — who is dragged into another of the Coens’ kidnapping plots. Goodman’s bombastic, idiotic Vietnam vet is an acquired taste, prone as he is to pulling a loaded gun on a bowling partner and smashing the wrong car with a tire iron. But he’s just one eccentric among many beautiful ones: the baffled yet appreciative Texas narrator (Sam Elliott); the legless tycoon Lebowski (David Huddleston) and his oily assistant (a great turn by Philip Seymour Hoffman); the tycoon’s haughty daughter (Julianne Moore’s all-time-sauciest turn); and all those nameless bowlers, caring for their craft and rolling strike after strike, demonstrating the grace and majesty of this blue-collar sport.
Our favorite, in a brief cameo: John Turturro as a purple suited adept named Jesus, who turns the bowling alley into bowling ballet and has a frankly erotic attachment to his ball (25-minute mark).