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 19th 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.
9 comments:
Liked your review, with a slightly different take. I didn't think the Coen brothers didn't like Gopnik, but see the world as basically unfair at times with God either absent or asleep. Just when you thought he was out of the woods, the existential clap of thunder - our mortality- comes rolling in.. I like the film a lot. Very Jewish.
I agree that Gopnik is looking for God, or something, that gives life meaning.But all his attempts to connect with rabbis and Jewish tradition seem empty. Are you saying if he found God that his existential torment would end? I think his salvation lies in reconciling his mathematics/idealism with the basic Darwinian way most people lead their lives.
I have another view of this movie and share it for what it is worth. The opening fable sets the stage for the movie. We do not know how to judge good and evil and even when the old reb goes off into the snowstorm we do not know if he is a dybbuk who was found out or a good man sent out to die. The women in the movie are all too certain of themselves and harsh. They miss the main point of life.
Jewish life is all about struggle and faith. We have no idols to worship, no nice heaven to reward us, and nowhere to turn but to our own hearts. Gopnik is a true believer who follows every truth with naïve fervor. Like Job his belief is tested over and over. He remains truth seeking and optimistic in the face of all of the adversity, a noble and serious man who cannot be shaken from his belief. God wills it and it is his lot to live it.
I found the film serious and sometimes hilarious. My main fault with it was that it was episodic in a way which seemed inartistic. We get jumpiness from skit to skit without having it serve any real purpose. The buildup of adversity is merely putting one more thing on the pile of adversity and no tension or feeling about it builds along with it.
It seemed to be a serious comedy about serious matters but we could never get too serious about it. I enjoyed watching the film but will soon forget it though it touches things I think about a great deal.
was struck by the fact that the old reb doesn't bleed from the ice pick in his chest and Tevye doesn't 'bleed' either, neither horrified or liberated. This suggests to me that neither man lives in his body or this physical plane of reality, a not uncommon Hassidic attitude. Gopnik's Jobian trials, in my view, are a mockery of this extreme survival strategy in a time and place where it is not necessary but cannot be discarded so easily. It is the dark side of the Jewish existential condition: fearing an outbreak of lethal anti-Semitism in Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," for example.
The old reb does bleed from the ice pick. We do not see it at first, but then the blood begins to stain his white shirt. That he goes off with the ice pick stuck in him adds to the mystery – or maybe he needed an ice pick!
Ha! Missed that one. Still doesn't change my theory.. but I suppose that's a Hassidic-like predilection for believing what I think rather than taking facts at face value.
My wife and I saw this movie, and - I suppose - like many others, were of 2 minds about it. On one level it is a comedy with some really funny scenes, and yet, on another, it can be viewed as a Jewish self-hating screed, as most of the characters in it (from Michael Stuhlbarg and especially Fred Melamed, to the son, the daughter, the wife, and several of the rabbis) are all such self-centered, selfish, "types." I guess the word "types" comes to mind, since many of them seem more like caricatures, rather than people, although I am sure that there are many such people. I found the film troubling.
This is definitely a troubling film, although I felt slightly less bleak than I did after seeing "No Country for Old Men," but not much. When the truth is found to be lies, accepted premises of reality do in fact die. But what is a lie, anyway? In Gopnik's science-based perspective, lies are things that are out of phase with their forms, things that haven't been reconfigured to respond to different inputs. It's the center that will not hold in Yeats poem, the dissolution of the post-modern age, our future still not quite yet ready for prime time.
I loved this movie, much as I have loved most of the Coen Brothers films and recently books.
Right now I am forgetting the line but throughout the film they invoke the deity more or less trying to understand what the will of Hashem (I think) is. Rather than self hating Jews, I think the Coens are spiritual beings suffering through human existence and coming to understand that whatever structure we try to put on things is sort of pointless. We yearn for connection but being a good boy doesn't mean we will find it. It just means we get to go on searching. This is pretty cool in itself, when we stop worrying about it. God is unfathomable and works in mysterious ways. Nature can be harsh and it can be kind and everything in between but there is nothing we can really do to pull the levers of it in supplication that works, so we are left looking for someone to love. In some ways this is a very Jewish idea. And because the talmud is so murky it is also an anti-Jewish idea.
Gnu?
This is sort of Garp for Jews. It is less painful since the characters are trying so hard to be nice.
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