A Serious Man with a Sense of Humor
Deeply moral and affecting, the new Joel & Ethan Coen film A Serious Man has a serious heart.
But it wouldn’t be a Coen Bros. film without an oblique sense of humor, and for a long while the message of A Serious Man doesn’t quite take hold. In fact, the Coens leave it to the final, perfect seconds of the film to resolve what they have so carefully set up. As the press agent for the film describes it, the Coens are “exploring questions of faith, familial responsibility, delinquent behavior, dental phenomena, academia, mortality and Judaism — and intersections thereof.”
Okay, so it’s a weird film. But stay with it.
In the late 1960s, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a mild-mannered professor in a mild-mannered Midwestern suburb. (The Coens grew up in Minneapolis.) Odd portents seem to follow him wherever he goes: at the office, a Korean student who failed a test passes him an envelope stuffed with cash and demands a passing grade. Larry keeps encountering his adolescent son Danny (Aaron Wolff) on the run from a bully — a pot dealer to whom Danny owes money as he studies for his Bar Mitzvah. Then, the thunderbolt. While he sits placidly grading math tests, Larry’s wife Judith (Sari Lennick) calmly informs him that their relationship is over. It seems she’s fallen for a calm-voiced, deeply reasonable, utter twit named Sy Abelman (Fred Melamed, who has an uncanny feel for this character’s unbearable pomposity.)
There is a sting of surrealness in the air. Much of it is left over from a seemingly unrelated prologue in which a Jewish couple in the old country (Russia? Poland? It’s unclear) in olden times (it could be 1890, or long before that) argue in Yiddish about the wisdom of welcoming an old man into their house. The husband thinks he’s harmless. The wife believes, and proves, that he is a monstrous “dybbuk.”
But this parable, seemingly told by the rabbis and handed down through time, gradually starts to merge with the contemporary story as Larry seeks advice from learned men, such as rabbis and a more updated version of the lawgiver — a divorce attorney. The one rabbi in the area who is believed to be among the wisest of men, though, isn’t available. It turns out the only people he counsels are boys who have completed their Bar Mitzvah. It’s a subtle reference, but it’s also the 60s in a nutshell: Youth, whose problems are limited to retrieving a missing $20 bill in order to pay off the local drug dealer, is exalted, while middle-aged chumps like Larry are pushed to the side. A joke that runs through the movie finds Larry, as he considers some new calamity, being interrupted by his son yelling that the TV aerial has to be fixed — otherwise F Troop is fuzzy.
I love the Coen’s films. Nihilist? I find them among the most moral of film makers working today. Haven’t seen this yet but I look forward to it.
Yawn! Another hyperSemetic movie out of Hollywood? Again? I’m still waiting for something good to come out of Hollywood.
Sounds worth seeing as I really enjoy the Coen films.
Have they joined the “Free Polanski” Hollywood pervs yet? Club membership gets an instant boycott.
Razing Arizonia needs a sequil.
“Have they joined the “Free Polanski” Hollywood pervs yet?”
I believe Ethan Coen signed the petition. Too bad. I was really looking forward to this movie.
I agree w/Thomas L. Having seen every film they’ve ever made, and remain torn between Fargo & The Big Lebowski when it comes to a favorite, I can’t wait to see this.
Why boycott? I mean even if one or both of them caved in to Hollyweird peer pressure on Polanski (or worse ACTUALLY subscribe to clemency as a bonus to earning his swiss lifetime ‘little Lebowski junior achiever’ award) why should I deprive myself of the guilty pleasure of paying to see great film making?
I hope Polanski spends whats left of his life behind bars. But I didn’t burn my Chinatown DVD. Its as brilliant today as the first time I saw it and one of my all time fav’s.
Nothing about what Debra Wingnut (I didn’t know she was still alive) said or any of the disgusting ‘protests’ have surprised me the least. Standard operating practice on the left coast. Not just another planet – it’s another universe in a different dimension.
I used to be a fan until the Hudsucker Proxy. That movie was just such an obvious lefty message movie – ah, yes, big business is evil. No nuance, no balance, no ambiguity – none of the usual tropes that are demanded and insisted upon when the film is one that has a positive view of some part of American culture. Nope. None of that. Once they did that, unconsciously, my political antennae were up. From then on I would cautiously approach their films, and view them through a very political, hyper critical lens. In my mind they were branded as liberals first and filmmakers second. As a result, I can’t enjoy a mostly good and funny movie like The Big Lebowski. Why? Because of the right-wing-republican-fake-crippled-ex-military character. It wasn’t merely the fact that this character was an absurd lefty cliche. It was that combined with the fact that that characters righty baggage is totally unnecessary for the structure of the plot or the movement of the story. When a director unnecessarily inserts a politically charged cliche into a film that’s not artistic storytelling it’s political preaching. When it happens the film begins to lose truth, honesty and credibility as a story. The more absurd the cliche, and the greater number of them placed in the story, the worse the movie becomes (as a non Coen Brother example of this see the ex-military-right-wing-republican-wall-street-journal-reading-Nazi-memorabilia-collecting-Ronald-Reagan-movie-watching-abusive-husband father character in the movie American
Beauty). I could go on about the liberal politics in Fargo – the last movie of theirs that I saw – but I won’t. In short I’m upset with them. And other liberals in Hollywood like them that I used to like. They’re talented and creative but insist on making a lefty political message, even if it’s just through a small character or sequence, a priority in their films. They either don’t know, or don’t care, the extent to which they’re branding themselves and alienating much of the country and many of their former fans. Am I being hypersensitive in all this? Maybe. Am I being unfair? I don’t think so. They are the ones that decided to put liberal politics in their movies. Oh, well. So, this latest movie sounds like it might not have overt liberal politics in it. Great. But let’s just say I’ll read up and ask around more before I’ll go see it.
raskolnikov is hypersensitive but i sure know what he is saying. everytime i see some character in a movie saying something about nixon (it will be bush in the future)which is not relevant to the story, plot or character it is really irritating. the eternally left wing hollywood writers just can’t help themselves. even so, it’s small potatoes compared to their idolization of people like Gore or M. Moore.