A Serious Man (2009)

There’s a scene in A Serious Man where a rabbi tries to counsel the protagonist, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), by telling him a story about a dentist. As the rabbi begins the tale, the events of his story play out in a flashback. Afterwards, when Larry asks what it means, even the rabbi doesn’t know. This sequence is a microcosm of the film as a whole, as Joel and Ethan Coen explore their midwestern Jewish upbringing and end up with a funny but puzzling film which ranks among the most bizarre of their career, yet fits perfectly within their canon. It’s also the most Jewish movie to hit theaters since Fiddler On The Roof.

Larry begins the film as an average man, a nebbish college physics professor with a wife, two obnoxious kids, and an anonymous tract house in suburban 1967 Minnesota. Larry’s life begins to resemble that of Job from the Old Testament, as he endures an increasing number of trials and tribulations. He’s pressured and bribed by a Korean student (David Kang) to change a failing grade. He’s warned by his door-slumping boss (Ari Hoptman) that his tenure application is hanging by a thread. His goy neighbor (Peter Breitmayer) is encroaching on their mutual property line. His brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), is an unemployed ne’er-do-well living on their couch, with a sebaceous cyst on his neck that has to be drained with a suction machine. His son, Danny (Aaron Wolff), is due for his bar mitzvah in two weeks, but the kid is more concerned about watching F Troop, smoking pot, and listening to Jefferson Airplane than studying the Torah. Larry’s even getting hassled by a guy from the Columbia Record Club (voiced by Warren Keith, the man behind unseen character Reilly Diefenbach in Fargo).

But the topper on Larry’s mountain of mishigoss is smooth-voiced, touchy-feely friend Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), who oh-so-soothingly breaks the news, alongside Larry’s wife Judith (Sari Lennick), that they want to be together and would Larry please be so kind as to give Judith a “get” (a Jewish divorce) and move out of the house? All this tsuris puts Larry in a crisis of faith; what has he done to deserve such ill treatment from Hashem (God)? He seeks answers from a series of rabbis, but only finds increasing frustration.

As the audience laughs along, we also seek answers to the spiritual questions and philosophical tenets posed throughout — and many people may be thrown off, as I initially was, by the sudden and abrupt ending of the movie. (I felt the same way about No Country For Old Men.) Is there no payoff, I wondered? No resolution? And then it occurred to me that those answers are unknowable, just as Larry comes to realize. In his classroom lectures, Larry speaks of both the Schrödinger’s Cat paradox and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, both illustrative of the futility in seeking absolute truth. Rabbis and Talmudic scholars have studied the Scriptures for centuries, codifying Hebrew words and characters into numerical values, passing down their wisdom from one rabbi to the next, and still have no real answers as to the true nature and purpose of the Almighty. It’s an unusual ending to a film, but, in retrospect, it’s an appropriate ending.

I’ve been a fan of the Coen brothers since their first film, Blood Simple, came out in 1984. I enjoy their dynamic visual style, their unusual camera angles, their darkly comic screenplays, and their eye for quirky actors. A Serious Man fits all that criteria, with a great cast of mostly unknown actors, sprinkled with a few familiar ones including Simon Helberg (The Big Bang Theory) as a very young rabbi, Adam Arkin as Larry’s attorney, and a hilarious cameo by Michael Lerner, who was Oscar-nominated as the studio chief in the Coens’ Barton Fink. Like that movie and most of the Coens’ work, A Serious Man pays great attention to period design; the clothing, interiors, and exteriors are perfectly reflective of those times. (For example, the Gopniks have a screen door, with aluminum curlicues and an initial in the middle, that’s an exact match from my childhood home.)

Of all their previous works, it reminds me the most of the aforementioned Barton Fink; it’s a strange work that makes you laugh and lets you marvel in the period details, even as you wonder, just like the protagonist, what’s really going on with life in general. A Serious Man is a comical movie, a Biblical parable, and a thought-provoking tale for Jews and Gentiles alike. See it with your best bubula.