A Serious Man
Directors: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
Writers: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
Producers: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
Stars: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick, Aaron Wolf, Jessica McManus, Peter Breitmayer, Fyvush Finkel
I use it often, but no movie in my memory is more appropriately described by Mel Brooks’ timeless saying “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.” Comedy is about suffering; then there is Jewish comedy, that shared invitation to find the ironies and chuckles hidden in horrible misfortune, from a culture that knows a few things about that. The defining joke of A Serious Man, the latest work from Joel & Ethan Coen, is that you can never tell a Jewish person things couldn’t possibly be worse.
A movie is rarely created which is such a perfect expression of its own idea. In their 2007 Academy Award-winner No Country For Old Men, the prodigious brothers achieved a purity of cinematic technique that seemed almost miraculous. A Serious Man, one of the best films of 2009, is produced at the same astounding pinnacle, and in its rueful way it is even less hopeful, but far more rib-splitting.
It is not about its incidents but its attitude, which is mean at a level people earn philosophy degrees to study. The universe it depicts is a disturbing one, since it will not just obstruct your ambitions but spite your whole existence. You might not want to see a movie that so masterfully suggests you live in a place like this. And yet, if you have ever felt your sanity and dignity unreasonably abused by fate, this will feel so familiar; maybe even morbidly comforting. Your community is who you suffer with – and if you’re in a community, at least you’re not alone.
The community of this movie is a Minneapolis suburb in the 1960’s, the brothers’ own breeding ground. At the end of the street is a lumbering bully who might be the source of every bellowing fat man who has ever intimidated a Coen Brothers protagonist. The looming counterculture revolution is just warming up to blast away tract home paradise, and its anthem is Grace Slick wailing “Somebody to Love”. Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) yearns to be an upright part of that paradise, the Serious Man of the title. In this world – the movie is saying – that is the worst sort of man to try and be.
He strives to be a dutiful husband and father, and even takes in his unemployed brother (Richard Kind), who scribbles what he thinks are the underlying numbers of the cosmos in a little journal, and whose hobby is draining his cyst. But his children are indifferent, self-centered, and ungrateful, and his wife (Sari Lennick) is having an affair. Gopnik can’t understand that their marriage had problems. Her lover Sy (Fred Melamed) has a suggestion for a motel Gopnik should move into, and says with his deep, soothing voice that as adults they can all make this transition go smoothly.
Then there is the man from the record club who keeps calling, claiming Gopnik owes him money; and the aggressive neighbor (Peter Breitmayer) who does not seem to respect the property line (a Jewish man might find reason to feel uncomfortable about that); and the student (David Kang) who attempts to bribe him over a failing test grade. Gopnik refuses the bribe, the student refuses his refusal, and what follows would be a sacred text for devotees of flawed logic.
Stuhlbarg’s performance is a remarkably choreographed stumble along the wobbly tightrope separating manageable angst and full existential freak-out. His life is a daily recalibration to the new normal of banal horror. When everyone else is telling you that the most sensible solution for the problem at hand is for you to suffer more, you can only disagree for too long before appearing impolite. And then just when you think you have the worst lot, someone else is around to say that compared to their life, you’re blessed.
He seeks advice from a series of rabbis, each older and wiser than the last but none any more helpful; the last sits in a dark office filled with arcana. This rabbi has been brought to paralysis from his pondering of the mysteries of existence; he is so wise he can barely speak.
If it were merely unrelenting and played for yuks, it would be an accomplished film but not the triumph that A Serious Man is. What the Coen Brothers achieve is the true humiliation of perpetually dashed hope. Even Gopnik’s dreams are hijacked. There is also – as is their hallmark – the ingenious specificity of setting, design and language. And finally there is that poignancy of Gopnik’s humiliation, the constant assault on his belief that there were supposed to be rules, a moral (or even a purpose!) to the story, compelling reasons to behave in an upright manner.
There is no cheat to their approach, and no deus ex machina (well, one could argue that last point, depending on your attitude about the Almighty). What they do to the earnest, pious Larry Gopnik, they do with absolute, and ruthless, integrity; not to mention peerless cinematic facility. Whether or not this is fair to Larry is so, so far from the correct question.