A Serious Man (2009)
A Serious Man opens on Friday nationwide.
Calls to God: Always a Busy Signal
Did you hear the one about the guy who lived in the land of Uz, who was perfect and upright and feared God? His name was Job. In the new movie version, "A Serious Man," some details have been changed. He's called Larry Gopnik and he lives in Minnesota, where he teaches physics at a university. When we first meet Larry, in the spring of 1967, his tenure case is pending, his son's bar mitzvah is approaching, and, as in the original, a lot of bad stuff is about to happen, for no apparent reason.
At work, Larry specializes in topics like Schrödinger's Paradox and the Heisenberg Principle — complex and esoteric ideas that can be summarized by the layman, more or less, as "God knows." Because we can't. Though if he does, he isn't saying much.
Larry, played with poignant, brow-furrowed deadpan by Michael Stuhlbarg, does not exactly fear the divinity whom he, like other devout Jews, calls Hashem ("the name" in Hebrew). It's more that he's puzzled, beleaguered, perplexed. What does God want from us? What should we expect from him? As weird inconveniences spiral into operatic miseries, Larry dutifully searches for clues, answers, signs. He talks to learned rabbis and listens to recordings of famous cantors. What he encounters, apart from haunting music and drab suburban sacred architecture, is silence, nonsense and — from that metaphysical zone beyond the screen, where the rest of us sit and watch — laughter.
"How odd of God" goes an old bit of doggerel "to choose the Jews." And how perversely fitting that Joel and Ethan Coen, who wrote and directed "A Serious Man," should elect to examine the deep peculiarity and calamitous consequences of this choice. The vein of fatalistic, skeptical humor that runs through so many of their movies has frequently had a Jewish inflection, both cultural and metaphysical. Here, that inheritance, glancingly present in movies like "Barton Fink" and "The Big Lebowski," is, so to speak, the whole megillah.
"A Serious Man" begins with a narrow-screen, Yiddish-language dramatization of an ersatz folk tale about a tzadik (Fyvush Finkel) who may or may not be a dybbuk. (A righteous man who might be a ghost. You see how much is lost in translation?)
The story is at once hilarious and horrific, its significance both self-evident and opaque. The same could be said of most of the Coen brothers' movies, in which human existence and the attempt to find meaning in it are equally futile, if also sometimes a lot of fun. (For us, at least.) Their insistence on the fundamental absence of a controlling order in the universe is matched among American filmmakers only by Woody Allen. The crucial difference is that the Coens are compulsive, rigorous formalists, as if they were trying in the same gesture to expose, and compensate for, the meaninglessness of life.
So a question put before the congregation by "A Serious Man" is whether it makes the case for atheism or looks at the world from a divine point of view. Are the Coens mocking God, playing God or taking his side in a rigged cosmic game? What's the difference?
The philosophical conundrums in "A Serious Man" can be posed only in jest — or, at least, in the cultural tradition of Ashkenazic Judaism that stretches from the shtetls of Poland to the comedy clubs of the Catskills, that is how they tend to be posed. But a deep anxiety lurks beneath the jokes, and though "A Serious Man" is written and structured like a farce, it is shot (by Roger Deakins), scored (by Carter Burwell) and edited (by the Coens' pseudonymous golem Roderick Jaynes) like a horror movie.
Everything that happens to Larry takes on a sinister cast. A student (David Kang) protests an "unjust" grade and tries to bribe him. Someone is sending letters to the tenure committee smearing Larry's good name, while the Columbia Record Club peppers him with dunning calls. His brother, Arthur (Richard Kind, Rabbi Segal's back door neighbor while growing up in Trenton, NJ)), at work on a mad mystico-mathematical text that will unlock the secrets of the cosmos, has moved into Larry's ranch-style house, taking his physical and mental health issues with him.
And in that house there is sibling warfare (between the bar mitzvah boy, played by Aaron Wolff, and his older sister, played by Jessica McManus), poor reception on the television and, all of a sudden, a collapsed marriage. Larry's wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), has taken up with an older widower named Sy Ableman (the splendidly unctuous Fred Melamed) — allegory, anyone? — who pompously lays claim to the movie's title role.
Forget plot summary, though. "A Serious Man," like "No Country for Old Men" and "Burn After Reading," is fundamentally a shaggy dog story. But while it is funnier than either of those movies, it also has more gravity to it. This is not just because it represents something of a homecoming for the brothers, who grew up in the heavily Jewish Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park in the 1960s. They are hardly the kind to be sentimental about the old neighborhood. But in that milieu their smart-alecky nihilism feels authentic rather than arch — you understand, maybe for the first time, where they are coming from.
"A Serious Man" continues their nonsequential, decade-by-decade, movie-guided tour of American history. And, as usual, a lot of history is left off screen: the '60s is pot, the Jefferson Airplane and a slight shift in attitudes toward what Judith calls "whoopsie-doopsie." But if they are diffident about the politics of the time — or perhaps just cleverly oblique —their sociological sense is unusually acute, if also exaggerated. Apart from a Korean student and an unfriendly neighbor, Larry lives surrounded by his own kind: lawyers, dentists, doctors, colleagues, a too-friendly neighbor. His world is a suburban shtetl on the edge of the prairie.
And the local details are, in the end, incidental. "A Serious Man" is, like its biblical source, a distilled, hyperbolic account of the human condition. The punch line is a little different, but you know the joke. And it's on you, of course.
"A Serious Man" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has drug use, swearing and the repeated violation of Commandments 3, 5 and 7 to 10.
A SERIOUS MAN
Opens on Friday nationwide.
Written, produced and directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen; director of photography, Roger Deakins; edited by Roderick Jaynes; music by Carter Burwell; production designer, Jess Gonchor; released by Focus Features. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.
WITH: Michael Stuhlbarg (Larry Gopnik), Richard Kind (Uncle Arthur), Fred Melamed (Sy Ableman), Sari Lennick (Judith Gopnik), Adam Arkin (Divorce Lawyer), Aaron Wolff (Danny Gopnik), Jessica McManus (Sarah Gopnik), David Kang (Clive Park) and Fyvush Finkel (Dybbuk?).
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