Joel and Ethan Coen grew up in suburban Minneapolis as the sons of academics. So it is that the Coen Brothers took inspiration from their own pasts to create A Serious Man. Much like O Brother, Where Art Thou? was inspired by Homer’s The Odyssey, Serious Man was likely inspired by The Book of Job.
The film opens with a strange prologue set in the 1800’s where a Jewish-Polish couple encounter a rabbi who the wife believes is a dybbuk, a spirit highjacking the body of a deceased individual. She believes they have been cursed and it appears that curse manifests utterly in the life of one man in 1967. Stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg plays Larry Gopnik, a Physics professor who has always tried to do the right thing and act as a good man, a “mensch,” if you will. So why is it that everything suddenly seems to go wrong in his life? His wife, Judith (Sari Lennick) asks for a divorce in order to marry her lover, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed). Ableman is an unctuous man who acts like Larry’s best friend while he steals his wife and boots him out of his own home.
Larry’s kids are selfish and self-involved. His daughter, Sarah (Jessica McManus), spends all her day washing her hair and stealing money from her parents in order to pay for a nose job. His son, Danny (Aaron Wolff), pays no attention in class instead listening to Jefferson Airplane on his transistor radio (the iPod of its time). While his dad deals with a painful divorce, Danny bugs him about being unable to get good reception for F-Troop. He attends his bar mitzvah completely stoned. Larry’s quest for tenure is endangered by anonymous letters slandering his integrity even as a South Korean exchange student simultaneously bribes and blackmails him over a bad grade. Larry’s shiftless brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), crashes on his couch and hogs the bathroom in order to drain a cyst on the back of his neck. Larry’s neighbor, Mr. Brandt (Peter Breitmayer) is a hunting aficionado who is encroaching on Larry’s property in order to build a tool shed. Brandt appears to have no love for Jews though he does have Larry’s back when confronted by the student’s father. Most likely he cares for Asians even less. Larry is also receiving incessant calls from the Columbia Record Club demanding payment for a subscription he has no clue about. He’s got doctor’s appointments, legal fees piling up, and a nude sunbathing neighbor tempting him off the righteous path.
Poor Larry is mostly a reactive individual. He hardly ever initiates action and avoids conflict whenever he can. He’s such a passive viewer of his own life; he may as well be sitting in the audience with us. It’s no coincidence that Larry’s wife left him for a fellow named Ableman.
All these problems lead to Larry questioning God’s purpose for him. His attempts to consult a series of Rabbis yield nothing. The first (Simon Helberg) asks him to admire the beauty of a parking lot, but poor Larry can only see desolation. The second (George Wyner) tells him a long story about a dentist who finds a message from God in the teeth of a patient. The story (like the film) has no ending. The third and most prolific, Rabbi Marshak (Alan Mandell), can’t even be bothered with him.
As the gods of Larry’s world, the Coens seem to delight in tormenting their hapless creation. They pile it on and on to the point where we can’t help but feel pity for Larry Gopnik just as we laugh at his misery. The Coens’ flair for irony and dark humor is fully on display. The film’s dialogue is written with deft precision. There’s incredible wit and multiple layers behind every word. The Coens have also utilized a cast of unknowns rather than their usual troop of actors making it easier for us to buy these people AS people and not just actors in roles.
A Serious Man is the Coen Brothers’ most idiosyncratic film since Barton Fink. It is likely to be their most polarizing as well. Serious Man combines the bleak isolation of No Country For Old Men with the oddball humor of Fargo. If you thought the ambiguous ending of the former was aggravating, the non-ending to Serious Man might have you demanding a refund from your local theater. However, in real life there are no easy, pat answers. Everything isn’t wrapped up in a neat, little bow and neither is A Serious Man.
Rating: ***
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