A SERIOUS MAN is your typical Coen Brothers’ comedy with a whole new cast. Instead of dealing with murders and kidnapping, this time it’s a satire on the Jewish tradition and connection with God. A SERIOUS MAN may not be… The Coen Bros’ best work yet but it’s still profound and irreverently funny.
“A Serious Man” is the story of an ordinary man’s search for clarity in a universe where Jefferson Airplane is on the radio and F-Troop is on TV. It is 1967, and Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university, has just been informed by his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) that she is leaving him. She has fallen in love with one of his more pompous colleagues, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), who seems to her a more substantial person than the feckless Larry. Larry’s unemployable brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is sleeping on the couch, his son Danny (Aaron Wolf) is a discipline problem and a shirker at Hebrew school, and his daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) is filching money from his wallet in order to save up for a nose job. While his wife and Sy Ableman blithely make new domestic arrangements, and his brother becomes more and more of a burden, an anonymous hostile letter-writer is trying to sabotage Larry’s chances for tenure at the university. Also, a graduate student seems to be trying to bribe him for a passing grade while at the same time threatening to sue him for defamation. Plus, the beautiful woman next door torments him by sunbathing nude. Struggling for equilibrium, Larry seeks advice from three different rabbis. Can anyone help him cope with his afflictions and become a righteous person – a mensch – a serious man?
What stands out about A SERIOUS MAN is The Coen Bros’ consistent interest in making fun of the little, unintentional habits like the disturbing, half gross sound one makes when she coughs, the ridiculously loud footstep as he’s walking down the hall, the old Rabbi’s heavy breathing as he speaks. The cinematography by Roger Deakins who’s worked with The Brothers before (No Country For Old Men, O Brother Where Art Thou) helps in elevating our sight because you get all these close up shots of body parts and the movement of a pointer pulled across a torah, and you’re tracing down the music radio wire, it all makes you feel like you’re in an episode of Honey I Shrunk Myself.
Michael Stuhlbargh’s performance as Larry Gopnik is a bit painful to watch and that’s not a negative comment. It’s easy to sympathize with Larry because he keeps being hit by one problem after another and Stuhlbarg looks like a poor wounded animal not knowing why he’s experiencing all this trouble. He’s uptight, confused, and weak. The Coen Brothers try to tie in the prologue scene and the simplicity wisdom at the beginning to the story but in the end, just like Burn After Reading, A SERIOUS MAN is a series of clusterf*ck, but instead of happening to a bunch of characters, it’s happening to one man and that’s a lot to take for one man. You will often feel a bit overwhelmed by the amount of Jewish reference that this movie has. From the music, to the tradition, from Bar Mitzvah to the Hewbrew language but Gopnik’s family face similar problem that any family of any religious background might encounter. A SERIOUS MAN is a movie for the fans, you gotta be familiar with The Coens’ Brothers’ sense of humor, their work in the past, in order for you to find this movie funny. Because if you’re not a fan, then you’ll probably won’t get why The Brothers’ have to have one his characters drop dead for no particular reason.
The profundity part comes if you analyze the themes carefully. This is a story of a man who thinks he’s done so much to deserve blessings but he realizes that he hasn’t done anything at all. He hasn’t done any publication for his tenure, he hasn’t kept up with the lives of his wife and children, he’s intimated by the bullies around him, and he desperately seeks different advice from different rabbis, asking for answers instead of having the confidence to make his own decisions. And all the while he’s wondering why God has left him hanging. It takes his poor confused brother, well-played by Richard Kind who comes off neurotic and paranoid, through a dream sequence, to finally remind him that he’s a blessed man all along. More than that, it takes himself to realize it when he finally said that God blesses those who help themselves. That’s what I like about A SERIOUS MAN, the emphasis on the idea that the only wrong thing to do is to do nothing at all. Sooner or later, if you just simply live and not live it to the fullest, life will find a way to catch up to you and make you pay your dues. I don’t know if this is Coen Brothers’ way of lecturing about depending one oneself instead relying on faith in God, I personally don’t see it as an atheistic approach but it’s more or less a rebuke on what it means to be… A SERIOUS MAN
* Place the cursor on the image below to check my grade for this film
