A Serious Man
by Chris Knipp

Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love" hovers over the scenes of the Coen brothers' A Serious Man, the story of a Sixties Minnesota Jewish college professor with a small family whose life starts to fall apart. One of the Coens' strangest and most thought-provoking films, this one is a black comedy, a meditation on Jewishness, and a modern rethinking of the Book of Job in a world where "Hashem" (God) isn't just incomprehensible but largely imperceptible. The movie has been seen as a mean-spirited product of self-hating Jews, but that's not right at all. Returning to their roots and their tribe, the Coens have never been more serious or, in their sardonic way, more kind. To see life as a cosmic joke is really quite orthodox. It just doesn't lend itself to easy answers. And the rabbis the professor consults haven't got any. They've got, basically, nothing.

The time and place echo the Coens' own youth. One of them might have been preparing for his Bar Mitzvah like Danny Gopnik (Aaron Wolff), the son of the film's nerdy but utterly decent physics teacher hero, Larry Gopnik (the excellent Michael Stuhlbarg). A Serious Man begins with a little Yiddish prologue set in long-ago shtetl Poland when a wife stabs an old man who's done a good deed for her husband because she thinks he's a dybbuk, a dead person possessed by an evil spirit. (The sequence is serious and gentle, in the manner of the Yiddish theater, and not a joke.) When the old man starts to bleed and wanders out into the snow, the couple realizes they've brought on terrible luck.

Terrible luck: that's what is visited upon Larry Gopnik. But first we see Danny listening to Sixties rock with an earpiece hooked to his transistor, in Hebrew class. The old teacher confiscates the little radio, and tucked into its case is $20 the boy owes somebody.

All the scenes are marked by the Coens' usual precision and elegance, but the movie is tricky to watch because it changes focus so rapidly. It alternates between offhand polyphonic passages in which four things are going on at once to super-focused ones where only one very intense thing is happening. Iit asks us to laugh and be cynical but demands metaphysical speculation.

The point is Larry has all this stuff going on at once: his wife (the implacable Sari Lennick) is leaving him, inexplicably, for the titular "serious man," the ultra-unctuous and self-satisfied Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), a widower who's wife died only three years ago. His hugs and reassurances of the value of communication show the feel-good clichés of the period used as a cynical ruse. At work, there's a Korean student Clive Park (David Kang) who tries to bribe Larry to change his F to a passing grade, and when Larry refuses, Clive's father threatens a lawsuit. The goy neighbors are vaguely menacing: they're infringing on Larry's property line. He's up for tenure, and somebody's sent the tenure committee letters impugning his morals. His useless brother Arthur, jobless and with a gambling problem, has come for refuge, and is sleeping in the living room. Larry's wife exiles them both to the Jolly Roger Motel. A "sophisticated" woman neighbor (Amy Landecker) who sunbathes in the nude, tempts Larry to "take advantage of the new freedoms." Meanwhile there's a daily pinprick that may morph into a serious threat: calls keep coming to the department office to say Larry owes money to a record club he never joined.

The children are simply not there. Danny is only interested in marijuana -- he goes through his Bar Mitzvah (almost as memorable a one as in Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday) entirely stoned -- along with getting better reception to watch a certain TV show, and rock music. (He learns his Torah passage nonetheless.) Danny's older sister goes to a club every day and is only interested in washing her hair. But all this is incidental, because as the formal inter-titles indicate, the central moments are Larry's attempts to consult with rabbis who will help him. But they're no help. "I, too, have forgotten how to see him in the world," says one (Simon Helberg), with a non-Jewish name, who cites the parking lot as a vision of the wonders of creation. A higher level rabbi (George Wyner), sipping tea, says "something like this, it's never a good time." The oldest, wisest rabbi, Rabbi Marshak (Alan Mandell), won't see him at all. He sees Danny after his Bar Mitzvah, returns his transistor radio to him, and quotes Jefferson Airplane.

Absolutely central to A Serious Man is its unremitting focus on Jewishness -- true to the Coens' own origins: they grew up in a heavily Jewish neighborhood, where you went to the synagogue and got Bar Mitzvahed. You became a doctor, a dentist, a lawyer: each of these professions comes in for an appearance, and Larry's various troubles leads him to more than one lawyer, with threatening bills. It's a nightmare! But it's also steeped in mundane quotidian Jewish experience. The Coens' irony has applied to being Minnesotan in Fargo, to being laid back in The Big Lebowski. But being Jewish is far more central to their comic worldview. What are the Jews? The Chosen People. Chosen for what? The Holocaust? Every memory of Jewish pride is matched by a twin memory of humiliation and rejection. None of the people around Larry are any real help. But he remains a good man. He remains nerdy, pants hitched up too high, shoulders hunched and legs bent too much on the roof adjusting the TV aerial for his oblivious son, but he's still admirable. And things may be turning around in his favor -- or not.

The Coens emerged as film-makers skilled at playing with genre in Blood Simple. Their triumph with another writer's material in No Country for Old Men showed their superficiality: they chose one of the great Cormac McCarthy's simplest, least profound books. It's impossible to claim great profundity for them in A Serious Man. But this isn't simplistic put-downs like The Ladykillers or Burn After Reading. There's far more complexity and humanity here. In making Larry Gopnik, the humble schlep (a smart mathematician but a dumkopf when it comes to people) into a Job, they redeem him, and they make the torments of man in a world where God can't be located accessible to us and to their humor. Does Jewish experience make the torments of the modern secular world any more comprehensible? Maybe not; but it's what they've got to work with.

©2009 Chris Knipp
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