A seriously funny film
The latest Coen brothers film asks a lot of questions but does it give any answers?
A Serious Man ****
DIRECTED BY Ethan and Joel Coen
STARRING Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, George Wyner
US 2009, 106 mins
The praise is endless: ‘brilliant’, ‘sublimely funny’, ‘a distilled, hyperbolic account of the human condition’. However, the most incisive comment about A Serious Man that I read was, “If you had told me you went to see a film which inflated a pastiche by spuriously linking it a philosophical theory I’d have said Coen Brothers before you’d finished talking!” That is essentially how I feel about the Coen brothers. I loved The Big Lebowski but still can’t forgive them for winning the Oscar for best film with Fargo in the year in which both The English Patient and Secrets and Lies were so much better.
I went with an open mind, given the universally great reviews. This film is indeed very funny, if a tad pretentious. You might want to brush up on your biblical literature, Jefferson Airplane lyrics and some quantum physics before you go; it is littered with references. And I need to mention the15 minute prologue in Yiddish set in a Polish Shtetl, which could be completely meaningless, especially if you are expecting an English language film and can’t read Greek subtitles!
The plot is simple. It is 1967 in the American Midwest. Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), the Job character and ‘serious man’ of the title, is a middle-aged, Jewish physics professor living in a Minnesota suburb. He is having a mid-life crisis not of his own making and wondering what he has done to deserve it. Larry says that ‘actions have consequences’ but Larry hasn’t done anything wrong. Stuhlbarg’s performance is poignant. At the same time, the deadpan delivery of his lines is partly what makes the film so funny. It is a slightly nihilistic yet comical exploration of religious beliefs and a search for answers to the ultimate human question: what’s it all about?
Does misfortune come from evil? Not in Larry’s case but the misfortune is piling up. Larry’s son’s bar mitzvah is approaching. His wife, Judith, talks about not getting ‘whoopsie-doopsie’ and wants a divorce to marry the smug, pompous Sy Ableman (played wonderfully by Fred Melamed) who offers Larry a bottle of wine for his wife. A Korean student is alternatively trying to bribe Larry for better marks and sue him for defamation. Someone is anonymously trying to scupper Larry’s chances of tenure at the university and the Columbia Record Company is chasing him for money he owes but knows nothing about. Why is this happening to him? The Korean student’s dad tells Larry to ‘accept the mystery’. This is something Larry has difficulty doing, as a rational man.
Larry turns to his faith and tradition to find the answers. As he works his way through three rabbis, he realises that there are more questions than answers. The second rabbi tells Larry, ‘we can’t know everything.’ Larry responds, ‘sounds like you don’t know anything!’ That about sums it all up. The third rabbi, the oldest and wisest, Marshak, has simply given up all hope; he has nothing to say to Larry. When he speaks, he misquotes Jefferson Airplane, ‘when the truth is found to be lies and the hope within you dies…’. The search is futile. Perhaps it is all meaningless after all.
Like Job, Larry endures and doesn’t complain. We can forgive Larry, in a moment of weakness, for turning to his lusty blonde neighbour, Mrs Samsky, who likes to sunbathe naked in her back garden. He is after all, just a man in a man’s world. So is this just a film about Jewish men and their mid-life hang-ups? All the main characters in the film are men and the women play minor roles. This is not a criticism of the film. It is simply interesting that the female characters come across as far more grounded and straightforward. Or possibly simplistic and aggressive? Larry’s daughter is completely obnoxious, his secretary behaves like his boss and his wife behaves like his mother. The only one who is vaguely redeemable is the sexy Mrs Samsky.
Are we supposed to think that the only characters who really seem to understand any deeper truths are Larry’s brother Arthur and his son Danny? Arthur is jobless and homeless. He sleeps on Larry’s couch and when he is not working on his probability map of the world, he is hogging the bathroom, draining his cyst. Arthur uses his mathematical knowledge to get himself huge winnings in a poker game. Danny uses dope to get though his bar mitzvah and thinks the only meaning worth searching for is on the TV or in the psychedelic music of Jefferson Airplane.
So what’s the point of the film? Rewind to the prologue. It centres around a ‘dybbuk’, some sort of wandering soul in human form, burdened by former sins, or a human form that might be a ghost? (The cultural reference points might be slightly beyond you if, like me, you don’t know your Jewish folklore). Move forward to the scene where Larry tries to explain the ‘Schrödinger’s Cat’ problem to his students. I don’t know my quantum physics either but this is an apparently famous thought experiment involving a cat in a box that might be alive or dead depending on an earlier random event. Apparently Einstein and Schrodinger agreed that the cat is either dead or alive without an observer. You can see where this is going? Or maybe not. Is there a connection? A deeper meaning? Larry doesn’t seem to make the connection with his own life.
I am not sure it is entirely brilliant as a piece of cinema, or as brilliant as the reviews would have you believe. But it is certainly a compulsively watchable, darkly ironic and thought-provoking comedy. And as I said earlier, a tad pretentious. The dialogue is witty and the quality of the acting is brilliant from largely unknown actors. I am not sure the apocalyptic ending will leave you with any answers but it is well worth seeing and a cut above most films that get a viewing in Cyprus.
