Jeff Bridges Compares One Battle After Another to The Big Lebowski

The Dude abides. Those three words encompass an entire worldview, a whole system of belief about how to cope with in an incredibly difficult world, one—in the case of one Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski—encompasses fake rich men, connected pornographers, and nihilists. And yet, as Sam Elliott’s cowboy intones in the final moments of the Coen Brothers classic The Big Lebowski, the Dude’s still out there, taking it easy for all us sinners.

One Battle After Another protagonist Bob Ferguson does not abide. Even after he left the revolutionary group the French 75 to spend his days raising his daughter Willa and smoking pot in the wilderness, he still frets about her safety, worried that someday the government will come in. And yet, if you ask Jeff Bridges, who brought the Dude to life, Bob Furgeson has a lot in common with El Duderino (if you’re not into the whole brevity thing).

When told by Entertainment Weekly that Leonardo DiCaprio borrowed from his take on the Dude to play Bob Ferguson, Bridges agreed. “I can see comparisons. Both of those guys, you look at ’em with a certain lens, and they look like lazy sons of bitches. They don’t really have anything to really give to the world or anything,” he pointed out. “But on closer examination, you see they’re kind of deeper than that, or their spirits run deeper than that. So I like the comparison.”

A loose riff on The Big Sleep, The Big Lebowski follows burned-out hippie and bowling enthusiast the Dude through early ’90s LA as he tries to get a rug that tied the room together replaced. Because the rug was destroyed by thugs who mistook him for a rich man also named Jeff Lebowski, the Dude contacts the big name counterpart, and gets reluctantly pushed into a plot as byzantine as anything Raymond Chandler concocted.

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another riffs on Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern novel Vineland, and stars DiCaprio as a former revolutionary who goes into action when military officer Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) kidnaps Willa (Chase Infiniti) and starts killing former comrades. And, like the Dude, Bob Furgeson does much of it in a bathrobe and pinning back his shaggy long hair.

One major difference between the two films, however, is their reception. One Battle After Another is one of the best reviewed movies of the year, and Den of Geek joins the chorus with our own five-star review. Conversely, The Big Lebowski‘s first critics gave it mixed reviews, baffled by its ambling nature, especially after the Coen Brothers’ triumphant previous film, Fargo. And yet, The Big Lebowski has unquestionably become one of the most beloved movies in the Coens’ impressive filmography.

That’s good news for One Battle After Another, which may be already enjoying critical acclaim and is likely going to be considered for awards, but is underperforming at the box office. Maybe it can have a Lebowski-esque reversal.

Until then, One Battle can count on support from Bridges at least. “I saw that movie — what a great movie, my gosh!” he enthused. “And the performances were all so wonderful. Leo just kicked ass, and everyone — Sean, the whole cast — it was just a wonderful experience.” So until One Battle After Another can become recognized as the classic it surely is, it can rest easy knowing that the Dude abides his love for it.