‘Serious Man’ is classic Cohen Brothers
By JEFFREY WESTHOFF
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“A Serious Man”
3-1/2 stars
Rated R for language, brief violence and some sexuality and nudity
Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes
Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
Starring Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Sari Lennick, Aaron Wolff
Whenever the Coen Brothers deliver a dud, as they did a year ago with “Burn After Reading,” you can expect them to bounce back quickly.
And they have.
“A Serious Man” is prime Coen Brothers. It may not gain the universal acclaim of “Fargo,” and probably won’t attract the cult followings of “The Big Lebowski” or “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” but “A Serious Man” is their most interesting film. Not coincidentally, it is also the film with the strongest connection to the real world.
“A Serious Man” takes place during 1967 in a mostly Jewish suburb of Minneapolis, which reflects Joel and Ethan Coen’s own adolescence. Like their father, the main character is a professor in a small university. The film is not autobiographical, though (for their father’s sake, we should hope not) but a dark comedy shaped by details of their childhood.
The Coens set the period when Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love” blares during the opening titles. This is not just dropping a pop tune into the soundtrack, but a clue to the film’s meaning. The song’s opening lines, “When the truth is found to be lies/And all the joy within you dies,” are significant enough to be repeated by a rabbi at a key moment.
Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) has been living a content life as a husband, father and physics professor. In one day, everything goes wrong. His wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), announces their marriage has failed and she is leaving him for another man, so would Larry please move to a motel? His children are teenagers and no longer respect him. His brother (Richard Kind), a mathematics genius with slight mental disorder, decides to test his probability formula by gambling, which gets him into trouble with the law.
Meanwhile, Larry thought he was certain to get tenure, but someone has been sending anonymous letters to the dean accusing him of “moral turpitude.” Larry suspects the student trying to bribe him for a passing grade.
If all this weren’t enough, the Columbia Record Club is harassing him.
Larry cannot make sense of this avalanche of misery. “I haven’t done anything,” he repeats. Everyone from his wife to his lawyer to his wife’s new boyfriend advises Larry to see a rabbi. “We’re Jews,” says a sympathetic neighbor. “We have this well of tradition to help us understand.”
Over the course of the story Larry pays three visits to three rabbis of increasing stature. Their advice doesn’t soothe him, though one rabbi tells a very funny and very Coen-esque parable about a dentist who finds a message from God inscribed in Hebrew in a patient’s incisors.
Larry remains mild-mannered as his burdens mount, so the easy comparison is the Book of Job. But as Linus once pointed out in “Peanuts,” it is a mistake to refer to “the patience of Job.” Job was not patient. Job bellyached mightily unto the Lord. Larry does a slow-burn act that flares briefly but never truly ignites.
“A Serious Man” isn’t as visually stylized as previous Coen movies (but not as intentionally bland as “Burn After Reading,” one of the few Coen films not shot by Roger Deakins). The playfulness (some might say obfuscation) of their writing remains. The film opens with a Yiddish prologue set in 1800s Poland that may or may not be a ghost story and has only a metaphoric relation to the main story.
Characters have the odd personalities and sometimes grotesque behaviors common to the Coen Brothers’ canon. Judith’s new boyfriend, Sy Ablemen (Fred Melamed) is an unctuous widower who insists on hugging Larry and is fond of the word “eminently.” Larry’s brother has a medical condition requiring him to use a device that sucks fluid from his neck.
The Coens often perform a 180-degree turn between films, and this time they do it through casting. “Burn After Reading” featured two major stars, George Clooney and Brad Pitt, backed by reliable members of the Coen troupe, Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins. “A Serious Man” is filled with unknowns. The most recognizable face belongs to Richard Kind, the comic actor who was a regular on “Spin City.”
Stuhlbarg, a stage actor who has had small roles in film and TV, carries “A Serious Man” with a magnificent and complex performance that balances the Coens’ requirements of comic and tragic. Larry is sympathetic figure, but at times a wretched one.
The more he says, “I haven’t done anything,” the more we realize that while he hasn’t done anything wrong, he hasn’t done much right either. Larry has become complacent and lost focus on the people around him. And while the punishment far outweighs the crime, he pays for his complacency.
To perhaps his greatest peril, Larry has ignored his son, Danny (Aaron Wolff). Both face parallel journeys: Larry’s tenure meeting coincides with Danny’s bar mitzvah. “A Serious Man” is a father-son story where the two fail to connect. In their most meaningful conversation, Danny asks his dad to fix the rooftop TV aerial so he can watch “F Troop.”
“A Serious Man” features what has become another Coen Brothers trademark, an abrupt ending. This one is not maddening, though. We take our leave of Larry Gopnick just as his crumbling life is about to get much more tragic, driving home the lessons of morality, suffering and religion that have made the usual Coen Brothers jokes a bit more somber and a bit more true this time around.
