The land of Uz, circa 1967: Michael Stuhlbarg in the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man
If you walk into the new Coen Brothers movie a few minutes late, you may think you’re in the wrong theater.
A Serious Man opens with an extended sequence shot in the square Academy ratio and performed in Yiddish. In a shtetl (a Jewish town), a stout, heavily bearded man comes home and begins to tell his stout, burly wife about the most fantastic thing that happened on the way home from work, only to be interrupted by a knock on the door. It seems he has invited a kindly old man to his domicile for a bowl of soup, but his wife has other ideas. She believes he’s a dybbuk (a disembodied ghost in another person’s flesh) and wastes no time stabbing him in the chest. At first this old soul just smiles at the knife handle protruding from his heart, but gradually a pool of blood begins to spread from the wound (a Coen Brothers trademark) and he shambles out into the snowy night, the door closing behind him. Roll credits.
Flash forward to the story proper, which is set in the Midwest in 1967 (although the film’s soundtrack features Jimi Hendrix’s “Machine Gun” and makes reference to Santana’s Abraxas album and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Cosmo’s Factory, all from 1970), leaving the viewer wondering just what the clumsily staged opening scene was all about. I’m sure if I watched the movie a few more times I could come up with an elaborate theory, but on its simplest level it foreshadows the plight of its doomed Jewish protagonist, a fellow named Larry Gopnik, who is perhaps being punished by God for his ancestors’ transgressions.
Larry, played with fidgety gusto by noted stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg, is a professor of physics who wears thick black-rimmed glasses, a pocket protector, and highwater pants. In short, he’s a nerd. He lives a closeted academic existence (where everything can be explained with numbers) and his tenure is currently pending. He has a wife and two kids: a daughter who wants a nose job and a son who wants to get high as often as possible.
Like his Biblical predecessor Job, Larry is an essentially good man to whom bad things happen. For starters, his wife not only bluntly informs him one night while he’s grading tests that she's leaving him for his friend, but also that she wants a get (a ritual divorce) so that she can remarry within the faith. On top of that, his unemployed brother (Richard Kind) seems to never leave the living room couch, an anonymous slanderer is sending hate mail to the tenure board, and he’s four months delinquent on his bill to the Columbia Record Club, a membership his son signed up for in his name.
If this were Miller’s Crossing, Larry would floor a triple shot of Irish whiskey and take it all in stride, or if it were The Big Lebowski, he’d say “f@ck it” and go bowling, but Larry is a serious man, so he goes to see the rabbi – three rabbis, actually – an allusion to the three speeches of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar from the Book of Job, although unlike their Biblical counterparts, Larry’s spiritual guides offer nothing more than Coenesque non sequiturs.
Joel and Ethan Coen, it should be noted, are a couple of Jewish guys from suburban Minnesota whose parents were both university professors. They’ve made reference to Judaism in their films before, most notably via The Big Lebowski’s Walter Sobchak, a Shomer Shabbos convert, but A Serious Man marks their first explicit examination of their faith and childhood upbringing.
They’ve taken us to Minnesota before, in the much lauded Fargo, a film whose humor has always seemed to me a bit broad and heavy-handed, like a tourist’s guide to Midwest cliché. Ironically, the Coens are at their best when poking fun at people outside their own milieu – the L.A. slacker culture of Lebowski or the Texan good ol’ boys of No Country for Old Men – but A Serious Man, despite being a clear labor of love, offers little more than a pastiche of Jewish stereotypes interspersed with the occasional in-joke that will likely fly over the head of the average gentile moviegoer.
Another crucial problem is Larry’s wife. As played by newcomer Sari Lennick, she’s shrill and unpleasant; if I were Larry, I’d be thrilled to shack up at the Jolly Roger Motel just to get her out of my hair. Likewise, Fred Melamed, as her lover Sy Ableman, is annoying and overbearing. When he dies off-screen halfway through the movie, the moment barely registers; if anything, it’s a feeling of relief.
But then, like the dybbuk of the opening, Sy returns in a dream – one of several ill-advised dream sequences – the worst of which tricks us into believing Larry is smuggling his brother across the Canadian border until a hunter’s rifle shot (a “Jew hunter,” so the conceit goes) jars us back to reality. Strange, because the Coens are usually very good at handling dreams, from the Busby Berkeley-on-acid dance sequence in The Big Lebowski, to, best of all, the long dream monologue delivered by Tommy Lee Jones at the end of No Country for Old Men, a perfect summation of the film’s bleak moral universe.
Like most Coen Brothers movies, the best moments of A Serious Man are the little touches: Larry’s son showing up to his bar mitzvah stoned out of his mind; his daughter constantly locked out of the bathroom because Uncle Arthur is draining the cyst on his neck; the old-as-Methuselah rabbi who confiscates a pocket transistor radio and becomes hooked on Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love.”
But the open-ended finale, with its visual allusion to the Book of Job, will leave some people wanting to immediately re-watch the movie, others rent it the day it comes out on DVD, and still others slap their foreheads and groan, wondering what the hell happened to their $8.25.
A Serious Man is currently playing at the Roxy in Burlington.
The trailer for A Serious Man:
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