
The title of the Coen Bros.’
A Serious Man is both ironic and not, as the filmmaking duo’s
latest is a borderline-farce about a 1967 Midwestern Jewish family’s
disintegration that slowly reveals layers of ever-graver fatalism. Of a
thematic piece with their prior
No
Country for Old Men and
Burn After
Reading, the Coens’ tale concerns physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael
Stuhlbarg), a put-upon man whose wife is leaving him for a pretentious bon
vivant (a fantastic Fred Melamed), whose student is attempting to
bribe/blackmail him for a better grade, and whose brother (Richard Kind) is
locked away in his bathroom draining a sebaceous cyst. Larry searches for
answers to his problems in reason but, as evidenced by a blackboard overwhelmed
by an Uncertainty Principle equation, comes up with nothing. Thus, he turns to
the temple, where a trio of rabbis afford him no greater enlightenment, blathering
on about a beautiful parking lot or recounting a parable about a goy who
received a seemingly divine message from God inscribed on the inside of his
teeth. As Larry navigates his insular Jewish suburban community, all he
discovers is pitiless randomness – or, as suggested by a Jewish folklore
prologue in which a woman in a shtetl kills a man (Fyvush Finkel) she believes
to be a dybbuk (i.e. demon), is his misery an act of carefully orchestrated
cultural payback from a God angry at past transgressions? The Coens’ latest
isn’t drawn in one-to-one cause-effect lines, its obliqueness lending suspense
and interpretative depth to the Job-like suffering of Larry, which might also
simply be the byproduct of – and elucidate a lesson about – small personal
moral transgressions snowballing into catastrophe. “Don’t you need somebody to
love?” croons Jefferson Airplane in the radio earplugs of Larry’s pot-smoking
son (Aaron Wolff), and the question lingers in the air like a taunt throughout
A Serious Man, a portrait of cruel
inevitability at once universal and rooted in a specific Jewish tradition,
imbued with dry humor and genuine pathos, and defined by a nimbleness, wit and
mystery that demands to be taken seriously.
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