A Serious Man

Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. Starring: Michael Stuhlbarg, Fred Melamed, and Richard Kind. 105 minutes.

A Serious Man was filmed in St. Louis Park, Minnesota where the Coens’ grew up in the Fifties. This black comedy is their most personal movie to date, the least ultra-violent and the most Jewish.

There’s a five minute Hassidic-flavored fable before the opening credits, a cinematic Rosetta Stone, done entirely in the mother tongue. Both loving and mocking, the vignette is set in 19^th century Eastern Europe and is basically a slow dance between the dreamy transcendence of Marc Chagall paintings and the unrelenting terror of dybbuks. A period piece made with Day-Glo exclamation marks. Call it a DNA sample drawn from memories of Jewish life in the shtetls where the industrial revolution never happened and pogroms and poverty did. Could it be that the Coens’ are coming out of the post-modern closet and revealing themselves as Jewish storytellers? It’s arguably the most surreal and shocking thing they’ve ever done.

Fast forward three generations to 1950’s America. The advert for the movie says it all: the protagonist, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), is fiddleless on the roof of his suburban tract home, TV aerial like a sail above his head, Noah searching the horizon for dry land. His body bristles with Stallonean grit but it’s oozing Rick Moranis from the gills, an unlikely hero in service of a hopelessly lost cause, a truly serious man. He’s Tevye dropped in the middle of Eisenhower’s America. Like red-shoed Dorothy in Emerald City, he’s a stranger in a very strange land, never quite at home. Gopnik’s wife and brother also have this quality, still wearing the psychological packing materials from the previous generation’s trek across the ocean to the Goldina Medina, America.

He’s a bit of an odd ball but easy to like, this Gopnik, a physics professor at a local college, a person who trusts mathematical equations to tell him when the sun is coming up rather than looking out the window. Stuhlbarg, who was the hedge fund consultant in the black comedy Cold Souls, plays him as the fruit of the tree of Jewish manhood: intelligent and unrelentingly fair, polite and helpful to everyone, even when attacked. A mensch. But there’s something off about the guy. He comes across both as comically inept like Nicholas Cage in the Coens’ Raising Arizona (1987) and virtuously inept like Billy Bob Thornton in the brothers’ 2001 film, The Man Who Wasn’t There.

And so it goes.

Like the aging hippie in The Big Lebowski who calls himself The Dude (Jeff Bridges), Gopnik pays a big price for not melting into the pot. He endures an endless series of bizarre things, all of them painful, as he gets wised up. His wife decides to leave him for another man (played with perfect pitch by Fred Melamed as an unctuous conniver). His brilliant, nutty brother (Richard Kind) has a criminal streak (Kind also plays a similar character on Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm). A student tries to bribe Gopnik to get a passing grade, and when he’s turned down, sabotages his teacher’s tenure review.

There are some truly funny moments in all this but there’s never any emotional pay-off for all the nasty stuff Gopnik goes through. The movie ends in the middle of nowhere as if the film makers just got tired of beating him up. It’s hard to fathom why the Coens’ made Gopnik likeable but don’t seem to like him themselves.

Near the end of the film, as the exhausted, cornered Gopnik teeters on the brink of finally accepting the bribe, we see him in his physics classroom covering a blackboard as big as a racquetball court with an elaborate proof of the uncertainty principle. He ends by telling the class that he’s just proved that nothing exists but that, in the end, doesn’t mean anything either.

The brothers are spot on in depicting the superficiality of lower middle class tract home life and the not-so-quiet desperation of its denizens, the feints and ululations of emptiness and alienation. Here they have returned to the scene of the crime in this film, the other side of the emotional tracks from Leave it to Beaver, closer to Revolutionary Road, laying bare the roots of the murderous glee of Fargo and the utter bleakness of No Country for Old Men.

The film ends with the Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit, a song that shows up frequently in the movie, almost a character for the role it plays in liberating Gopnik’s son from his parents’ world and, surprisingly, linking him to his Eastern European forebears. Quoth the Airplane: “When the truth is found to be lies/ and all the joy within you dies/ don’t you want somebody to love?”

Well, sure. But in the Coens’ world love seems to be just another shell game, and personal integrity never quite antes up.

Amelia

Starring Hilary Swank, Richard Gere; Directed by Mira Nair; 111 minutes

There are two pioneering women crossing the Atlantic Ocean in this film. One is the title character, Amelia Earhart (Hilary Swank), a Kansas native, the first woman to fly across the pond. The other is Mira Nair, the film’s director (Salaam Bombay, Monsoon Wedding), the first Indian woman to make a movie about Americans.

Earhart made her historic flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1928, about a year after Charles Lindbergh’s epochal jaunt. America fell head over heels in love with her, just the way it had with gallant, modest Lindbergh, and she became an instant inspiration to millions, a mythic swan soaring above the horizon lines of cash and class, the festering scabs of World War One.

The funny thing is that she did it as a passenger in a plane with two others, not as a solo pilot like Lindbergh, but never mind. America was hungry for a “Lady Lindy” and Amelia filled the bill. The film takes care to show us that flying was Earhart’s one true and only real love and setting aviation records her deepest passion.

There have been umpteen biopics about Earhart, a charmed, reckless, ultimately self-destructive person who died young (like James Dean and Michael Jackson) and who still has star power after she’s shuffled off the mortal coil. Amelia is the BBC version of this classic America tale: the exuberance of fearless, questing youth translated into the tragic, cold fire of Laurence of Arabia, more shadow than light. That said, Nair has made a lovely, overstuffed sofa of a film in the Merchant Ivory style, every frame brimming with opulence and comfort. Even minor characters are beautifully dressed, their clothing like supple architecture. Voiceovers of the actual words Earhart wrote and spoke about her flying experience add human feeling, even magic, to what is typically AOK. A nice touch.

Hilary Swank plays Earhart with a homespun elegance. She’s willful without ever being strident, sounding British even without an accent. An undeclared feminist just after women had won the right to vote, Earhart famously gave her husband a written note at their wedding ceremony freeing him, and herself, from living by medieval codes of faithfulness. She was a force of nature as certain and silent as the capillaries moving blood through vital organs, needing neither permission nor forgiveness.

Swank is 10 years into a career that began with a breathtaking, gender-bending performance in Boys Don’t Cry, for which she won the first of her two Academy Awards (the other was for Million Dollar Baby). The challenge of playing Earhart was to stay strictly within a narrow personality while somehow acting like there were no boundaries at all. A finely calibrated performance.

Richard Gere plays Amelia’s husband, George Putnam, the PR maven behind Earhart’s commercial success. He initially saw her as a heroic spokesperson for the inchoate air travel industry. He also knew a brand when he saw one, and used her to sell books and air travel products. A meal ticket, in other words. But Putnam, although a couple of decades Amelia’s senior, also fell in love with her, and kept proposing until she agreed to marry him.

Gere plays Putnam with a genteel, faintly patrician FDR-style accent, a welcome variation on the classy but commercially crass character he played in Chicago (and a hike from his nimble, nuanced work in An Officer and a Gentleman). It’s a role that doesn’t call for very much beyond absolute devotion to the heroine. Like Stanley Tucci playing Julia Child’s husband in “Julie/Julia,” what’s needed are male cups deliberately not runneth over at a female party. Still, quite a serviceable supporting role (both).

Earhart’s relationship with Putnam is complicated by her affair with Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), an aviation pioneer about Amelia’s age (and father of writer Gore Vidal). Some of Earhart’s biographers think that Gene was the love of her life although she ultimately chose to be with Putnam; they also talk about Earhart’s close relationships with her sister (who called her ‘Meelie’) and mother, and Putnam’s two offspring from his first marriage, her stepsons. None of this is in the film, hard to fathom from a director whose previous films showed a talent for slowly revealing underlying layers of emotion, some not so pretty. The price of a ticket west across the Atlantic?