A Serious Man

The H-Bomb: Larry Gopnick (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a mild-mannered Jewish physics professor who has been having it rough lately. In fact, to say he’s been having it rough is a bit of an understatement. To put it more accurately, Larry’s life is systematically going to shit around him. He’s being simultaneously bribed and blackmailed by a student who got an “unsatisfactory” grade in his class. His dysfunctional brother (Richard Kind) lives in his house and is always getting in trouble with the law. He’s having a property line dispute with his redneck neighbor. His son is getting stoned and listening to Jefferson Airplane when he should be studying Hebrew for his Bar mitzvah. He’s up for tenure at his university, but someone has been sending the tenure committee libelous letters about him. And, to top it all off, his wife is divorcing him for another man and wants him to move out of the house. Poor Larry, what can we say? When it rains, it pours.

The Coen Bros.’ resume is a mixed bag for me. Most of the time the critics will almost unanimously declare their movies brilliant, and in many cases, I’ll agree (“O’ Brother, Where Art Thou?”, “Fargo”, “Barton Fink”, “No Country For Old Men” are all great films). Sometimes though, I’ll see a movie of their’s being praised up the ass, and when I finally get to watch it, I’ll think to myself, “There’s a bad case of ’The Emperor’s New Clothes’ going around here.”

As far as I’m concerned, that’s entirely the case with “A Serious Man.” Many consider it their latest masterpiece, but I do not. This one is more on par with “The Man Who Wasn’t There” and “Burn After Reading”. It features many colorful characters such as Rabbis, Lawyers, Doctors, Jewish Housewives, a number of scenes that range from interesting to amusing, and the Coens drawing from their own experiences growing up in a Jewish household in the 60’s suburban mid-west, which gives the film an authenticity. It has the Coen Bros.’ signature flair for dark comedy, and it’s never dull and often entertaining. But sadly, at the end it just didn’t add up to much.

When the closing titles abruptly came up, my first thought was “Huh?” and my second was, “What was the point?” It does seem to be making some point about life in general and how you have to take the good with the bad and how it has its ups and downs… okay… and? It’s as though the Brothers Coen made this movie simply to amuse themselves by seeing how all the pretentious, art film types will scratch their heads as they ponder its “meaning.” If that’s the case, then wouldn’t the film ultimately be meaningless?

Or maybe that is the point. That the movie’s meaning is meaningless, and thus saying that life itself is meaningless and that bad things happen to good people for no reason and… ah fuck, I’m walking right in to that trap. The films’ prologue, set in 1800’s Europe with dialogue spoken in Yiddish, is seemingly disconnected from the rest of the movie and only adds another layer of confusion.

And another thing, the Coens are Jewish, and in a sense I can admire their ability to poke fun at their own. But the film is filled to the brim with so many Jewish stereotypes, most of which are shown in a truly unflattering light, that I can’t help but think that if this movie were made by a gentile, many of the critics who have praised it would instead be calling it one of the most offensive, anti-Semitic pieces of crap ever made. In other words, if Mel Gibson had directed this film, the overall critical reaction I think would have been considerably different.

That aside, “A Serious Man” is not a total wash. Far from it, in fact. As I said, the Coens’ oddball sense of humor is very much present here, Roger Deakins’ cinematography is as lush and gorgeous as ever, and the actors are very enjoyable in their various quirky roles. There is a lot to like and admire here, I just wish that when the Coens were stuffing their film with all the eccentricities they could imagine, that they had remembered to include a discernible point. “A Serious Man” is far from their most inspired work. It’s worth a rent, but nothing more than that.