For their new film, A Serious Man, the Coen brothers have turned for inspiration to their mid-western upbringing in a Jewish neighbourhood. This provides the platform for a film about the search for definite answers when there are none, and how to cope with uncertainty amid a quiet simple life.
Larry Gopnik (Michael Stulbarg), is a mild bumbling physics professor whose son, Danny (Aaron Wolff), is fast approaching his Bar mitzvah. Larry’s life is immediately disrupted by a series of events, which catch him off-guard: a Korean student attempts to bribe him to improve his grade, and his wife Judith (played with ferocious austerity by Sari Wagner Lennick), informs him she wants a divorce so she can be with their overtly tactile friend Sy Abelman (Fred Melamed).
Meanwhile, his brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is sleeping on his couch, consumed with perfecting a mathematical formula to aid his gambling addiction. To deal with his marital woes, Larry employs a homely lawyer and seeks spiritual guidance from three very different Rabbis. Unfortunately for Larry, the people he reaches out to can never give him the complete answers his scientific mind desperately craves.
Despite the misery that is often inflicted upon the film’s central characters, the Coens never resort to an ironical distance to soften the blow. A Serious Man is at times unsettling and disturbing and doesn’t try to offer the traditional redemption that many movies of this type often do.
As well as the emotional drama of the story, there are many fine comic touches as you would expect from a Coen brothers’ film: Danny reciting the Tora at his Bar mitzvah stoned and red eyed; a spiralling telephone conversation regarding Santana with Columbia Records club; and a hilariously opaque tale told by a Rabbi about the Goy’s teeth, set to Jimi Hendrix’s “Machine Gun”, to name but a few.
The setting of the film in the 1960s isn’t used as a playful romp through all that was kitsch and fun about that decade, but underlines the tensions that still exist in suburban life and Jewish culture between change and tradition. Roger Deakins’ cinematography is exquisite but subtle, and doesn’t ever resort to the overt obvious imagery that period films often do. Also, by not using any Hollywood stars or immediately recognisable names, the Coen brothers successfully deny our usual expectations and give the characters a more identifiable quality.
One of the few criticisms that you can level at the Coen brothers throughout their career is that their films can lack heart. It turns out though, like the Lion in Wizard of Oz, that they had one all along. It will be interesting to see where they point their torchlight next, now that they have succeeded in illuminating not just the souls of others, but a bit of themselves.
A Serious Man is presently playing in Montreal at AMC Forum 22. Check out the movie trailer.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Great review! It gets right to the heart of wny I should see this movie. Enough is revealed and analyzed to pique my interest, but not so much that I feel I’ve already seen it. More like this one, please… PS will have to use the phrase ‘ferocious austeriety’ some time soon!
This is a great review, but I wonder if the critic may have purposefully left out the fact that this movie is a modern retelling of the story of Job in the Old Testament.
Great review! “The setting of the film in the 1960s isn’t used as a playful romp through all that was kitsch and fun about that decade, but underlines the tensions that still exist in suburban life and Jewish culture between change and tradition. ” Now that’s interesting – I’m really looking forward to seeing this film!