Review

Review Date: 18-October-09
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Just OK

A Serious Man (2009)

After mixed reactions to the Coen brothers' films over the years, I wandered into A Serious Man thinking only that they had earned my curiosity about what was coming next. I should not be surprised that they surprised me. Always bold and increasingly sure-footed over the years, Joel and Ethan have created a strange philosophical picture that does not quite fit the label "dark comedy." It is more like "life is so dark you had better scrounge for comedy."

A Serious Man is the rare Hollywood movie that is steeped in an ethnic culture. It takes place among a Jewish community, and in the Midwest during the 1960s no less. The backdrop is essential to the piece, for not only could an outsider miss meanings (and many viewers will be ignorant of the era if not the ethnicity), but the main themes are tied to religion (along with the apothegms of Jefferson Airplane). Consider the bookends of the film: an opening vignette in which a couple in the old country meets a manifestation of unholiness, and the stark finale in which retribution is delivered by God. In between, the slowly simmering story follows Larry Gopnik, a physics professor suffering a Job-like moment. His wife is leaving him for an annoying widower (Fred Melamed), his kids are whiners, his unemployed brother (Richard Kind) keeps getting arrested, and his position at work is precarious as he is coming up for tenure. The family troubles mean mounting legal bills, and his rednecked neighbor is encroaching on his lawn.

Larry is played by Michael Stuhlbarg, a seriously excellent find, and you cannot help but feel for the guy. Though wishy-washy he does not seem to have brought these things on himself. The crux of his quandaries is that anyone who might have answers, i.e., the revered old rabbi or God, is unreachable. The only conclusion to hand is that crappy stuff happens to decent people for no intelligible reason, and all they can do is deal with it, evidently by not taking it seriously. Larry gets this message from a junior rabbi and the father of one of his students, who, in a genuinely funny scene, urges him to relish the mystery of being stuck between a rock and a hard place. In time most of Larry's problems go away — until he and his pothead son (Aaron Wolff) each deliberately commits a sin. For a wry look at how a man deals with reality in a certain place and time, divine thunderbolts are a startling punchline. When people lead a bland, blameless life they might be slammed and when they put a toe over the line they will definitely be blasted. Hah hah! The Coens are no strangers to grimness, but that thought is enough to make anybody dead serious.

Copyright © 2009 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.