MOVIE REVIEW
'A Serious Man': Coen brothers deliver a brilliant film
The great Yiddish word for it is “tsurus.” Some people spell it “tsoris.” However you spell it, it means trouble and Larry Gopnik’s got it by the ton.
A SERIOUS MAN
Four stars (Out of four)
STARRING: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed and Sari Lennick
DIRECTOR: Joel and Ethan Coen
RUNNING TIME: 105 minutes
RATING: R for language, some sex and nudity and brief violence.
THE LOWDOWN: Joel and Ethan Coen’s acclaimed film about a very unlucky man and his struggles with Midwestern Jewish life in the suburbs of the late 1960s.
He is a college professor with a wife and two kids and shaky tenure. His wife is leaving him for the most condescending and unctuous yutz in town. His kids won’t listen to him. His live-in brother Arthur insists on treating his sebaceous cyst in public. And he’s got a student who tries to bribe him for a better grade.
He’s a good man — a serious man — struggling mightily to stay that way. When the hot number next door sunbathes nude, he can’t help watching from the roof he happens to be standing on. But let her invite him in for a close-quartered neighborly tete-a-tete on the new sexual freedoms suddenly opening up to suburbanites, and he’ll remain faithful to his faithless wife.
He’s the hero of the best black comedy the Coen Brothers have made since “The Big Lebowski” — and for good reason. The Coen Brothers actually seem to like Larry Gopnik, just as they seemed to like the entirely different Jeff Lebowski, with his mustache and beard full of White Russian juice. Even when Jeff Lebowski had a tendency to talk of himself in self-aggrandizing third person (“I’m the dude!”), he was still the sort of hapless Holy Fool who would help cast his friend’s ashes to the wind and end up getting a face full of them.
Multiply by 10 and that’s the sort of haplessness that characterizes Larry Gopnik, a sort of suburban Jewish Job from the era of “Laugh-In,” the Jefferson Airplane and Six Day War in the Middle East.
In the Bible, you remember, Job had three “comforters” of decidedly dubious utility: Bildad, Eliphaz and Zophar.
So does Larry. His are three rabbis whose salutary contributions to Larry’s malaise are nothing if not lacking. The punchline for the final rabbinical consultation in the film is one of the Coen Brothers’ best jokes. It still makes me laugh even though I saw the film at the Toronto Film Festival months ago.
The epigraph to the film is from Rashi, Jewish wise man of the Talmud: “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.”
Easier said than done, of course, which is why the film begins with an extravagantly black and white folk tale supposedly explaining just what curse may be visiting itself on unlucky Larry.
It goes without saying, I hope, that this is the first time the Coen Brothers have ever come anywhere close to the Midwestern Jewish milieu they were raised in. It is, of course, no surprise that their father was an economics professor. While they’ve been quite rigorous denying any autobiography to the film, other than the milieu and setting, you can’t help but wonder if their obvious affection for Larry — a rarity in the work of two men whose work is usually misanthropic to one degree or other — comes from any similarities to their father.
Larry is played by Michael Stuhlbarg, a theater actor making his major movie debut. Uncle Arthur is played by Richard Kind (best known for “Spin City”) and the new lover of Larry’s wife is played by Fred Melamed with such congealed oiliness that you could lubricate a bicycle with it. Mrs. Gopnik is played by Jessica McManus.
There is, in some eyes, perhaps just a wee bit too much physical ungainliness in the Coen Brothers’ portrait of their youthful milieu. Missing, really, is that era’s assumptions about appearances and assimilations. Their view of it all certainly isn’t pretty, but it’s all, I think, in the same harsh light you find in the early stories of Philip Roth (which some Jews actually found so pitiless they seemed anti-Semitic).
At the same time, who can resist an orthodontist who tells stories about “the goy’s teeth” while Jimi Hendrix records play in his office? “A Serious Man” is wickedly funny, from all viewpoints. But the ending, I must say, is a wrench of the plot — along with a final image — that gives all this comedy a kind of perspective that might almost — almost — seem as if it partook of some kind of authentic religious wisdom about fate. (At that point, remember Rashi.)
Imagine that — the misanthropes who gave us “O! Brother Where Art Thou?,” “Barton Fink” and “Miller’s Crossing” suddenly, seized by something that might almost pass for wisdom. And, unlike “Fargo,” no one had to be stuffed into a wood chipper first.•
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