I start watching Coen Brothers movies more with a sense of duty than in anticipation these days, but I’ll readily admit A Serious Man is their most engaging and well-thought-through film in a long time. After the cop-outs and pseudo-arty fan dances of No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man plays as something of a comic companion piece that’s actually far more incisive about waning attitudes of faith and stoicism in the face of calamity that’s either proof of cosmic-scale, inarguable divine intent in the world or its opposite, mere meaningless chance.
In the late ‘60s, nearly-tenured physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) falls down the rabbit hole of his own life during an extended crisis commencing when his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) announces she’s leaving him for another man. His children steal from him, his clever but sickly and awkward brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is plagued by police, he’s tempted by one neighbour’s pot-puffing wife (Amy Landecker) and faced with mounting money problems as not only does everything go wrong for him, he’s also expected to clean up everyone else’s mess. Judith’s paramour, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), is a widower who plays the soothing voice of love whilst writing backstabbing letters to Larry’s bosses, and when, after he’s been turfed out of his home to make room for Sy, and the man then dies in a car crash, Judith insists that Larry pay for his funeral. Rather than say no, Larry feels lingering, nagging doubts about the methodology of Hashem – God – and how it applies to him.
Most of the Coens’ familiar ploys and limitations are immediately in evidence, as they lay out their material with the showy aplomb of a nerd student arranging his multi-coloured pens and slide ruler before an exam. Period details are brittle and fastidious in their obviousness (Squares with crew-cuts!
It’s not too hard to see why the Coens’ works are catnip to a specific sensibility shared by so many fairly intelligent (particularly American) viewers: their bewildered, largely passive and outmatched protagonists stand in sharp contrast to the high powered super-humans of so many movies, and their narratives usually disassemble popular myths of meritocracy within democracy with ruthless purpose, even whilst the faintly alien, overdrawn stylisation keeps anyone from having to identify too deeply: they walk a line between high tragedy and low farce but avoid the truly defining aspects of either. It’s interesting that one of the few times that the brothers ever attempted to, however ironically, explore the more identifiably populist, affirmative side of their shtick, albeit infused with a subtle irony, as based on Capra-esque parable, with The Hudsucker Proxy, it fell flat with audiences, where their mordant but one-dimensional discursiveness sans subtlety usually wins plaudits. Where O Brother, Where Art Thou? took Homer as a template, A Serious Man riffs on the trials of Job, but the parable is again far less than deliberate and perfect.
Instead, whilst their other films have usually tackled, with varying degrees of success, various genres and eras to be mashed up and regurgitated, A Serious Man bases itself thoroughly in mid-century Jewish-American literature, with an opening prologue straight out of Singer or Aleichem, before segueing into material well-trodden by Malamud and Bellow, whilst Larry’s constant protests of “I haven’t done anything!”, dragging the spirit of The Trial’s Joseph K into a scrupulously evoked Uptightsville, USA, circa Groovy. As in Kafka, and in Job, there’s always a sin to be realised, if not one yet committed, then one still to be committed if enough pressure is exerted, and if not then, the sin of pride in doing no wrong. And yet, in all honesty at the film’s heart is simply the familiar Jewish anxiety best summed up by Mel Brooks: hope for the best, expect the worst.
Where A Serious Man stands head and shoulders above so much of the brothers’ recent work is that the stronger humour and emotional urgency is well-woven into the story, with a constant friction between tradition and modernity, wisdom and bullshit, circumspection and cowardice, devotion to duty and mere obedience to cant, always in evidence. The Jewish-American world as described in the film, seemingly transcribed with some authenticity by the Coens from their Minnesotan youth, is one trying to retain a relatively hermetic cultural outlook, carried over from an old world setting described in the opening, in which the reason/faith, caution/action divide is cleanly demarcated, as a shtetl husband (Allen Lewis Rickman) watches in alarm and horror as his wife (Yelena Shmulenson) stabs a man (Fyvush Finkel) she thinks is a dybbuk. That kind of superstition-riddled faith and certainty is hardly in evidence anymore, but Larry, beset by his mounting problems and aching, introspective disillusionment, probes his local Rabbis like an irritable plaintiff demanding to know why his insurance policy hasn’t been cashed.
Larry is for all intents and purposes the Son of Barton Fink, similarly gawky, superlative with manipulating symbols but inarticulate in life, beset by random insanity and at the mercy of bullies and bizarreness. His sudden desire to gain religious answers to his situation feels more like dramatic convenience than anything else, and the narrative’s final stages avoids with remarkable, and suspicious, skill, entering into the clash of dogma and nihilism his situation evokes with anything like intellectual heft. Instead there’s plentiful satire on the customs of religious parable-making and the Jewish storytelling tradition, with Rabbis offering up pointless anecdotes and unconvincing bromides. The story is self-consciously situated upon a cultural fault-line – the ‘60s were a time of upheaval, don’t you know – with Larry’s son Danny (Aaron Wolff) tuning out his Hebrew class in preference for the punchier but vaguer spiritualism of Grace Slick and learning his Torah reading for his upcoming Bar Mitzvah through listening to a record, and his daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) is saving up to erase her Jewishness through a nose job. The old Rabbi, Marshack (Alan Mandell), who is promised as a fount of wisdom, is uninterested in pastoral work and finally offers both the simplest, most elemental, and most useless, advice to Danny: “Try to be good.”
Like many other Coen characters, too, Larry is faced with constant temptations to wander off the righteous path, fooled by all the signals into thinking it’s not only desirable but finally of no consequence to do so, and when Larry finally does something unethical, the relatively even keel his life eventually returns to is swiftly undone, wrath of Jehovah seeming to swiftly follow in the shape of threatening medical test results and a looming, almost metaphysically terrifying tornado. I don’t think any of this is to be mistaken for profundity – genuine artists would have taken such simple debating class points as a commencement and not a conclusion, and once again the Coens’ effects are far too studied and timid to be actually, properly disorientating or morally powerful. But it’s hard to deny it’s often funny and essayed with technically impeccable, intelligently crafted filmmaking, like an excellent single-shot scene in which Larry enters his house to be assaulted by wife and kids with completely discursive complaints and individual rhythms of dissatisfaction.
The mixture of humour and nuisance is particularly strong in the Yin-Yang opposition of Stuhlbarg’s excellent performance, alternately frozen into inexpressive perplexity and seething with unreleased anger or sorrow, and Melman’s pitch-perfect embodiment of the arch-wanker Ableman, building to a hilarious dream sequence in which Ableman visits Larry from beyond the grave and begins bashing his head against a chalk board and heralding his cuckolding with relish. Stuhlbarg, although called upon to do almost nothing overt, keeps the film’s nervous energy in constant balance: his relative freshness as a star performer (as opposed to the somewhat cliché casting of the likes of Kind and George Wyner) lends the film a fresher quality than having cast John Turturro again would have.
“Why me, oh Lord?” “Why not?” I think that gag was in 10,000 BC. Or was it The Wizard of Id?
