A Serious Man

I hope this film gets the recognition it deserves. I have been a fan of the Coen brothers ever since they burst upon the scene with Blood Simple. Several brilliant films, and only a very few duds, later, they have created what I think must be their most personal movie, and their affection for the subject matter shows. This one looks and feels a bit different than past films of theirs. Not always--it's smart-alecky at times, just as you'd want it if you're a Coen-head like me--but it also raises questions that haven't appeared in their previous work. Don't worry, they're not going soft. But they are looking around a little more, beyond the boundaries of genre and into themselves, perhaps.




A SERIOUS MAN

No one makes films quite like the Coen brothers. Since their attention-grabbing debut in 1984 with the neo-noir classic Blood Simple, the Coens have carved themselves a unique niche in American filmmaking. Creators of dark, cynical tales filled with violence and black humor, Joel and Ethan Coen have drawn a map of the American Soul as a morass of greed, misguided passion, and uncomprehending desperation. Though many of their star-crossed characters come to bad ends, they’re usually too dim-brained or foolhardy to be considered victims of tragedy—it might be more accurate to call them victims of a fatal kind of bewilderment.

The Coens’ latest film, A Serious Man, has a different look and feel to it, however, which suggests they’ve got something else in mind this time. Eschewing their stock world of schemers, criminals, and people living on the margins of nowhere, the brothers take aim for once at the middle class--in this case, the Jewish-American middle class of the 1960s. Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a professor of mathematics at a small Minnesota college. He has a wife, two teenage children, a tract house in the suburbs, and aspirations to nothing higher than tenure and a modest career as a mid-level academic. But beneath its seemingly calm surface, Larry’s life is on the verge of falling apart. His wife is bored with their marriage and wants a divorce so she can marry another man. His daughter and son barely acknowledge his existence, except of course when they want something. His very odd brother, out of work and living with them over his family’s objections, has gambling problems and perhaps is soliciting sex from local school children. The college is receiving anonymous letters blackening his character, which has placed his tenure status in jeopardy. He has money troubles. And then a student of his offers him a bribe to change a failing grade…

All of this is revealed in the course of a few days in the life of this not particularly heroic hero, a nebbishy Everyman who tries not so much to solve his problems as to figure out why they are happening to him and what they all mean. Despite the increasing desperation he feels, Larry’s role in his own life remains essentially a passive one. He remonstrates with his wife about her decision to leave him, but meekly complies with her demand that he move to a motel, despite the fact that she’s the one having the affair. He helplessly watches his brother’s mysterious and disturbing presence in his home further alienate his wife and undermine his authority with his children. A sexy neighbor who sunbathes in the nude awakens his sleeping libido, but his timidity prevents him from making any headway with her. And although he tries to get tough with the student who’s tried to bribe him, he backs down when the student threatens to sue him for defamation of character, and stashes the money in his desk without ever reporting it to the proper authorities. In short, Larry has trouble taking action of any kind to improve his lot. He seems incapable of helping himself. He’s stuck.

Perhaps if he were in someone else’s movie, he’d have a chance to get unstuck and turn his life around, but the Brothers Coen don’t create characters to show them mercy, they create them to parade their sufferings across the screen in ways both cruel and hilarious. Larry’s life is an updated version of the Old Testatment story of Job, and like that famously tormented patriarch, he desperately wants to understand why, since he’s tried so hard to live his life as a good (i.e.“serious”) man, his once comfortable existence is vanishing before his very eyes. But in his tormentors’ hands--not just God this time, the Coens as well--Larry’s search for understanding becomes an ironic journey toward greater confusion and uncertainty instead of enlightenment. This is for two simple reasons: 1) even if there were someone who could explain his life to him (there isn’t), 2) Larry most likely wouldn’t be able to grasp it anyway. His passivity precludes the kind of imagination necessary to transform the mysteries of existence into spiritual insight. As a mathematician, he’s comfortable with abstractions that lend themselves to numerical representation, not those that lead to transcendent thinking.

Larry’s failure to achieve understanding—his anti-quest, in effect—is neatly summarized by his visits to three rabbis. Job was visited by three friends who counseled him about his troubles and his relationship with God; Larry makes appointments with three spiritual counselors looking for the same kind of guidance—and gets bupkis for his pains. It is in these sequences that the Coens’ flair for satire really makes itself felt. The eccentric, patronizing, and seriously unhelpful advice Larry gets from the rabbis shows just how unprepared organized religion is--any religion, not just Judaism--when called upon to deal with problems that fall outside its limited purview. Whether genuinely obtuse or just so bored from years of listening to complaints they can no longer recognize real distress, the rabbis offer Larry nothing but platitudes and awkward silence. He leaves each meeting more frustrated, more lost than ever.

A Serious Man marks a welcome return to form for the Coens. After the lazy plotting and smug sarcasm of their last film, Burn after Reading, it’s good to see their jaded perspective used to deepen and darken a comedy already rich in the ironies of human existence, instead of merely adding a wiseguy attitude to a pedestrian story. Man is an existential comedy on a par with some of Woody Allen’s most memorable films of the 1980s, such as Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors. The Coens’ philosophical ambitions are announced in their movie’s black-and-white opening, a droll staging of a Yiddish folk tale in which a peasant couple is visited one night by an old man who may or may not be a dybbuk (a troublesome ghost). As disturbing as his appearance in their home is, his abrupt departure is even more so, because it leaves them with a question: have they been cursed by the spirit’s presence or spared his wrath by the mercy of God? As viewers, we are left to decide for ourselves, and our dilemma mirrors not only the couple’s but Larry’s as well. Larry’s life, as it will begin to unfold onscreen moments later, is a series of such “visits” by events beyond his imagining or control—a succession of trials that stretch the shadow of this dark introductory fable across the length of the entire film.

As the hapless Larry, Stuhlbarg turns in a thoughtful, nicely shaded performance, comfortably occupying the focal point of the film’s conflicting emotions without becoming entrapped by any single one. Anger, disbelief, self-pity, indecision, and the mildest hint of rebellion all vie to be uppermost in his portrait of a man under siege, and Stuhlbarg performs the necessary balancing act between these varying responses with aplomb. The Coens do not ask for psychological insight from their cast of largely unknown actors, just that they keep their performances consistent with the mood of the film. If Larry seems to be repeating his confused reactions each time he receives a blow without making progress toward acceptance or a resolution of any kind, it’s because his makers don’t want him to grow or acquire depth as a person but simply to follow his preordained path to its end. This is the Coens’ modus operandi: even in a “philosophical” comedy, they’re more interested in external behavior than the inner life of people.

But there can be exceptions, and the one in this film is pretty remarkable. Richard Kind’s portrayal of Arthur, Larry’s deeply troubled brother, is so angst-ridden and intense it threatens to destabilize the film every time he appears. A bitter, tormented, dysfunctional personality, Arthur seems to exist mainly inside himself, emerging occasionally into the world only to wreak havoc: using his brilliance with numbers (he’s a mathematician also) to concoct elaborate gambling schemes, which gets him into trouble with a local bookie, or projecting his lonely sexual fantasies onto children. A peripheral presence in the story, Arthur accompanies Larry into exile at the motel, inseparable from him, like his doppelganger or darker half. By way of emphasizing this relationship, he is shown only in scenes that include Larry—never by himself or interacting independently with others—and photographed mostly in darkness, his sad figure framed in the background of shots or on the edges of the screen. It’s as if the shadow cast across A Serious Man by the opening sequence comes to rest in him: he is the movie’s actual dybbuk, a disturbing, unpredictable presence whose behavior cannot rationally be explained. Kind’s startling work in this small but crucial role makes the irrational frighteningly real.

And it does something else, too--it hints at the real emotions lying beneath the icy surface of the Coens’ sardonic attitude. It’s not much of a stretch to view this film as unusually personal for them. I read somewhere that Larry is based on the Coens’ father, himself a college professor, and they grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis, much like the setting of this film. Larry’s teenage son, Danny (Aaron Wolf), could be a stand-in for the brothers themselves, in this regard. From Danny’s vantage point, A Serious Man is a coming-of-age story, and this vantage point literally becomes the film’s during the sequence of his bar mitzvah, much of which is shot with the camera taking his point-of-view. The bar mitzvah provides the movie with its emotional climax, bringing together many of the characters and allowing them a quiet interlude of reconciliation and rest as the moving ceremony unfolds (even Larry and his estranged wife, Judith, share an almost tender moment). Danny’s journey toward manhood means he will eventually inherit the world from his father, a melancholy truth the film captures in its haunting final shot: Danny and his fellow students stand outside their Hebrew School, watching the sudden, surprising approach of a tornado. The image of a whirlwind and the turmoil it symbolizes is from The Book of Job; its ingenious inclusion here is from the book of Coen.

Is A Serious Man the Coens’ most “serious” film yet? It’s certainly one of their soberest, and could be their most introspective, given the roots of the story in their family’s experience. Its narrative style subtly underscores this shift in tone and purpose. For once they employ no gimmicks or artful twists in the plot; it’s straightforward story-telling the whole way, at a more relaxed pace than usual and with the volume turned down. The tragicomedy of existence has long been the Coens’ playground, but only with this film do they stop and do some genuine thinking about it—specifically, about the sad injustice of bad things happening to a good man. Despite lacing the movie with their trademark black humor and satire, the Coens are very serious about their protagonist and his life. Larry Gopnik’s downfall comes, unhappily, without insight or redemption, because it comes without his having committed a sin or crime to bring it about. He has done nothing to deserve his fate, except, ironically, not to resist it more--to accede too easily in becoming its victim. Only if timidity is a sin does his punishment make sense. But in the face of A Serious Man, I see only bewilderment.