The Big Lebowski (1998)

Underneath the bathrobe this is a Raymond Chandler structure, almost beat for beat. A private man is summoned to a rich man's house, given a job, handed a missing woman and a pile of money, and sent out to meet a series of strange people in Los Angeles. The Coens kept the entire shape of a detective story and gave it to a man with no curiosity, no stake and no interest in solving anything. That single swap is the joke, and it never stops being funny.

It failed in cinemas and then became one of the most quoted films ever made, which makes sense once you notice that almost nothing in it is about plot. It is about the way three friends talk to each other. Walter turning every conversation into Vietnam, Donny asking questions two minutes late, the Dude trying to keep the peace so he can go bowling. The film is a hangout movie wearing a crime movie as a disguise.

The thing that keeps it alive is that the Dude is genuinely decent. He is lazy and useless and he does not lie, he does not want anyone's money, and when he finally works out what happened he is mostly just annoyed about the rug. In a run of films full of men destroying themselves for cash, we are putting one in the middle about a man who cannot be bothered. That is not an accident.

Sam Elliott's narrator opens the film by telling you the Dude is the hero this place and time needs, then admits he has lost his train of thought. That is the movie warning you not to look for a moral. The Stranger keeps promising the story means something and then failing to say what.

The film is full of men performing masculinity badly. Walter and his military past, the Big Lebowski and his achievements, Jesus Quintana and his whole routine, the nihilists who are not committed to anything including nihilism. Almost every man in it is running a bit. The Dude is the only one who is not, and he is the only one who ends the film unharmed.

Notice how money works here. Every character is chasing a million dollars that may never have existed, and the only person who gets anything out of the whole affair is Maude, who wanted a child and organised the entire thing quietly around it. The Coens hide the actual plot in plain sight and let everyone else run in circles.

Donny is the one place the film lets a real feeling through. He is ignored the entire movie, he dies pointlessly, and the scattering of the ashes is both the most absurd scene in the picture and the only sad one. The Coens spend two hours refusing to take anything seriously and then ambush you with a friend nobody listened to.