Jonathan Kiefer
A Serious Man
Written and directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen
As an exercise in futility (a Coen-brothers-appreciation primer if ever there was one), let’s imagine what might have happened had A Serious Man been made by gentiles, or, Hashem forbid, by Arabs.
Under those circumstances, it might be called the most anti-Semitic film of the year.
Hashem, by the way, is the name that characters in A Serious Man say instead of God, because they are serious Jews. They are funny too, the film suggests, but only because they’re so serious. As in not laughing with, laughing at.
Not that religious seriousness ever was the Coens’ first priority. It has been reported that Ethan wrote a philosophy thesis at Princeton in which he described belief in God as “the height of stupidity.” Later, he and Joel wrote Blood Simple and Barton Fink and Fargo and The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou? and all the rest. Earlier, they endured suburban dullness and spiritual desperation in mid-’60s Minnesota — or so A Serious Man, set there, suggests. It’s the story of a schlemiel who hopes to be a mensch, but only suffers for his efforts. Is the suffering his own fault? His family’s? His neighbors? Hashem’s?
No, it’s the Coen brothers’. They’re pitiless. They’re like children torturing a small animal. For an audience. Of unpleasant Jews.
Timidly put-upon middle-class assimilate Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a professor of physics, lately has begun to observe the allegorical implications of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Larry seems to have become derailed from his tenure track. His wife (Sari Lennick) plans to leave him for a sanctimonious goon (Fred Melamed). His daughter (Jessica McManus) is stealing his cash to save up for a nose job. His son (Aaron Wolf) just wants to get high and watch F-Troop or listen to Jefferson Airplane in Hebrew school. And his mopey, unemployed, cyst-afflicted gambler brother (Richard Kind) lives on the couch and monopolizes the bathroom. Also, Larry has been fielding increasingly irritated calls from a collections officer of the Columbia Record Club. It goes on like this. Eventually, the stoned nude-sunbather next door (Amy Landecker) asks, “Do you take advantage of the new freedoms?” Larry doesn’t really know what to say.
Mostly he hoists his eyebrows, yanks down the corners of his mouth and diminishes his voice with a grating quaver. He does turn for guidance to a series of three rabbis, each less helpful and more monstrous than the last. The middle rabbi tells Larry a (brilliantly edited, Jimi Hendrix-enhanced) tale of a Jewish dentist who discovered a coded Hebrew message engraved inside a goy patient’s teeth. But the tale leaves Larry unfulfilled and well within his rights to reply, “It sounds like you don’t know anything. Why even tell me the story?” Once the delight of an expectation-defying punchline has abated, the same might be said to the filmmakers by their audience.
What seems to matter most is the suffering, and the spectacle. A Serious Man makes room for characters both sebaceous and phlegmatic. Roger Deakins’ cinematography is as skillful as always, but the way the camera looks at these people is like leering and also like staring them down.
It’s illuminating to have A Serious Man in theaters at the same time as Where the Wild Things Are, whose own menagerie of hairy, enormous, personal-space-invading grotesques derives from Maurice Sendak’s child’s-eye view of his old-world Jewish relatives. That view could be glaring at times, but would not now be so familiar to so many of us were it not also so fundamentally humane.
The Coens’ gargoyles, on the other hand, are universally loathsome. Not just ugly, they all tend to be morally or at the very least temperamentally repellent too. It’s fair to say they seem rather less likely than Sendak’s and Spike Jonze’s Wild Things to cement parent-child bonds and inspire several generations worth of proprietary affection. Not that the Coens even care about that.
What do they care about? What had they hoped to extract from this particular plot of personal history? Maybe they did intend a satirically affectionate commemoration, or even a Voltairean denunciation of faith-based optimism, but in any case what they’ve made seems more like some sort of long-deferred, highly disciplined tantrum.
So, phew, it’s a good thing they’re not gentiles or Arabs.
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10 Responses to “A Serious Man”
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The Book of Job writ small…that is, small in the least complimentary of senses, I guess.
Perhaps this is a Barton Fink do over in its gloominess?
Indeed, it does seem descended from Barton Fink. And from Job.
So, how mean do you think the Coen’s other movies are, generally speaking? And then, how mean is A Serious Man by comparison?
Well, I could probably use a refresher, but on the whole I’d say pretty mean. That’s why I think The Big Lebowski’s secret weapon is warmth, and why Cormac McCarthy, not exactly Mr. Nice Guy, seemed suitable for them to adapt. A Serious Man strikes me as among the meanest. It’s Fargo-like, too, but with a more hopeless ending.
I found warmth in Raising Arizona as well.
This is what’s so interesting to me about the Coen brothers. It seems that criticism about them divides pretty smoothly into those who think that the Coen brothers are mean to their characters (generalizing way out, that they’re misanthropists) and those who think that the Coen brothers actually like their characters, even if they do terrible things to them (generalizing way out, that they’re humanists, though morbidly so). I’m almost always in the second camp—I suppose this makes me a Coen brothers fan; that and the fact that I’ve seen most of their movies—though I’ll readily concede that some of their movies are warmer than others. It is very hard to find warmth in Burn After Reading.
It’s funny, though, that the same set of movies could produce such divergent viewpoints. Is it something about the style? The cinematography? The turns of the plots? That they push the characters’ characterization at least halfway (if not all the way) into caricature? I don’t know. Probably someone with a much keener critical mind than mine could suss it out. Meanwhile, I’ll just rent Miller’s Crossing again sometime in the near future. That movie’s one of my faves.
I thought they were great with Blood Simple; it was mean, but also very slick, so you could find it amusing. Raising Arizona was surprisingly warm, and Miller’s Crossing was almost “epic.” I began to tire of them with Barton Fink which just seemed over the top and out of their league. I seem to recall a series of easily avoided films after that, until Fargo turned it all around, among the best films of that year. It’s been hit and miss I think since then (O Brother, another warm good one). I rarely like an entire movie, but what I mainly get is the feeling that they too are bored with it before it’s over, so it’s not only that they’re mean to their characters, it’s also that their characters don’t really mean anything to them. Sounds like this one might be an exception: it means something to them to be this mean!
It’s true, they’re polarizing. And I wonder if it IS something about the style. I do find the slickness too exaggerated and self-congratulatory sometimes, and perhaps the logical conclusion therefore is that it’s not just meanness but a sense of superiority. I daresay their most ardent fans get off on that schadenfreude because it makes the fans feel smart and superior too. Which is fun and all but also emotionally limited. I appreciate Donald’s point about characters not really meaning anything to them. That speaks to my own concern: If the filmmakers won’t really invest in their characters, why should we?
I don’t want to get bogged down in thinking too much about “Why did the artist do that?” Not just because it spoils the experience of enjoying the art itself, but because there are TOO. MANY. POSSIBILITIES:
a) Suppose you’re an artist with very little to say. (You will run out of what to say pretty fast.)
b) Suppose you’re an artist who gets depressed because of troubles in real life — say, that your Mom dies.
c) Suppose you’re an artist who burns out on drugs and/or booze, and your talent shrivels up.
d) Suppose you’re an artist who is working while seriously ill.
e) Suppose you’re an artists whose inherent dark side grows stronger until it takes over the work and…
But I could go on and on, and never be able to enjoy ARIZONA JUNIOR again.
[…] little awkward. For starters, there’s that inevitable confusion with the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, and the fact of both movies having to do with horn-rimmed sad sacks who feel trapped in the […]