A Serious Man

[A part of Faith February]

The Uncertainty Principle. It proves we can't ever really know... what's going on. So it shouldn't bother you. Not being able to figure anything out. Although you will be responsible for this on the mid-term. - Larry Gopnik

When you think of the Coen Brothers, you probably think of Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and No Country for Old Men, or perhaps Barton Fink, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, or Raising Arizona first. Their films are distinguished by their anxious, fatalistic, and distinctly Jewish sense of humor.

A Serious Man probably did not spring to mind, but it may be the Coens’ most ambitious movie to date. In it, we finally get the Coen Brothers’ look at an explicitly Jewish scenario taking place in a hellish vision of 1960s suburban Minnesota, which happens to be when and where they grew up.

There are many ways of interpreting this movie, which both is and isn’t a comedy. The Job-like protagonist, Larry, can’t stop his life from falling apart, and has done seemingly nothing to deserve his worsening situation. Like the fisherman in Winter Light, he seeks holy men for answers, and they have none. But unlike Winter Light, in which the God of the New Testament was absent, the God of the Old Testament seems quite active in A Serious Man, striking men dead in retribution, tempting Larry and summoning tornados. Is God trying to teach Larry a lesson? Is Larry part of a larger design? Or is he receiving comeuppance for his pride? Larry has seemingly done everything right, but his life is rotten in every way, and his wife and children are indifferent to him. Is he or isn’t he doing the right things? If he did, would it matter?

The difficulty many critics had in evaluating the film when it came out a few years ago suggests it is ripe for deeper analysis, which I can only begin to do here. (A rewatch would help.) But I’ll offer an interpretation of the final scenes. Danny is honored to meet the oldest and wisest rabbi, who simply commands him to “be a good boy.” Danny decides to pay off his debt to the bully he has been running from the whole movie. But in this moment, money - often a motivating but corrupting force in the Coens’ movies - has become irrelevant. All faces turn toward the act of God taking place before them. The Coens’ choose to show Hashem entering the world as a tornado, both wrathful and majestic, something powerful and completely beyond comprehension.

Feature Presentation:

A Serious Man, written and directed by Joel&Ethan Coen

Starring Michael Stuhlbarg, Sari Lennick, Fred Melamed, Aaron Wolff

2009,

A Jewish physics teacher seeks help from three rabbis as his life starts to fall apart.

Next time: Dancing in fields, pretty skies, walking on water, sunlight in the trees, and Pizza Hut.

A deep, poignant, very personal, doubtful but also affectionate reflection on life, family, religion, faith, fate, tradition. Cast is excellent, with a massive Michael Stuhlbarg obviously stealing the show as a meek, middle class Jewish family man whose life seems just like a succession of unlucky episodes. Movie's got it all: a seemingly out of place prologue set in Poland (?) circa a hundred years ago basically introduces the viewer to the Jewish faith, then you have humour, incredibly sad scenes, happy ones, comedy, dream sequences; pace is ablaze, script is stellar. Basically a Coen movie at the top of their form. Ultra recommended if you need something different

A Serious Man was an entertaining film but one that left me with more questions than it answered. From a narrative perspective I felt that it was left incomplete, the ending of the film partially resolves some of the conflicts surrounding the title character Larry Gopnik, but for the most part it's left open-ended and there are even new conflicts introduced at the end of the film (Gopnik has a presumably serious medical problem revealed by some x-rays and there is a tornado bearing down on him). The proceedings are classically Coen, following a character who is subjected to the worst of luck, nothing going right for them. Perhaps this was the entire point of the film, that this guy just cannot catch a break and in 'real life' all of your problems don't magically resolve after a period of intense conflict, but nonetheless I found the plot pretty cynical and unsatisfying. The character of Gopnik doesn't develop too much throughout the course of the film, doesn't really solve any of the pressing problems in his life nor does he develop mechanisms to cope with his stress. I think the Coens are being very deliberate in eschewing the conventions of traditional narrative here, but to what end?

Whilst I'm not fond of the dark central arc, the film does have a lot of things going for it. There's a broad cast of characters, all of whom are memorable even with minute amounts of screen-time. Gopnik's gruff, gun-toting neighbour only has a few lines, but the few lines he has are very telling. The junior rabbi was another great character who only exists in the film for one scene, but has a great presence. It's also pretty damn funny at times, the scene toward the end where the son is attending his bar-mitzvah high is downright hysterical, as is his interaction with the senior rabbi. Cinematographer Roger Deakins communicates his altered state in a novel way, blurring the edges of the frame with a tilt-shift lens and rotating the frame into queasy dutch angles. The of the kids are hilarious. Deakins also renders suburbia unusually, pushing it to the point of overexposure to craft this environment that's so bright and clean that it almost hurts ( ).

I think I'm going to have to rewatch this film to try and piece it together a bit more, as with Barton Fink there seems to be a lot of highly symbolic imagery and content (Gopnik is blinded by the sun, the uncertainty principle, the story about the inscribed teeth, the weird prologue sequence that I don't understand the significance of). What did you guys make of this film? How do you rate it compared to other Coen Brothers films?

When people categorize the Coen Brothers, it’s often in two groups, the grittier thrillers and the quirky comedies, with some movies like Fargo that are nice mixes of both. Now I’ll say I haven’t seen all of their works, but I’ve seen 9 of their films, most of their well known projects but I still need to see O Brother and Raising Arizona

But Inside Llewyn David and A Serious Man don’t really check either of those boxes for me. They are two that stand out as looking and feeling somewhat similar to each other and different from all the rest. So many of their films focus on grand ensembles of zany characters, while these two are rather intimate and very personal stories about a specific character.

Both films certainly have many laughs but the comedy is extremely bleak and tragic. A lot of the humor comes from the main character, Llewyn or Lawrence, having extraordinarily bad luck, there is a darkly comedic nature to the way their lives fall apart. These two films fall into the definition of farce quite well, and I feel that makes them stand out among the other Coen Brothers’ movies.

Inside Llewyn Davis has a stunning lead performance from Oscar Isaac, and you follow this character through a few of the shittiest, most bad luck days one could imagine. His career and relationships suffer as a result of his cynical nature, the bad situations he finds himself in, and his unfortunate luck.

In A Serious Man, Michael Stuhlbarg’s Larry Gopnik sees his entire life slowly fall apart when his wife leaves him and various other things go wrong in his personal life and at work.

There is a beautifully heartbreaking charm to both films and the portraits they paint of their lead characters. They are funny but also quite sad and profound. And I also find them stylistically similar, with duller colors and a more intimate cinematography that emphasizes the messy and ugly worlds they live in.

Many Coen Brothers films involve stakes more significant than these two, with lots of crime, murders, kidnapping, thievery, but these two are the films that I am the most impacted by because the stories of Llewyn and Larry are handled with such weight and significance. That, coupled with their fantastic performances, great scripts, and plenty of funny moments, is why Inside Llewyn David and A Serious Man are my two favorite Coen Brothers’ films

Edit- I’m going to clarify because so many people have commented, I know A Serious Man and Inside Llewyn Davis are both acclaimed and well respected films critically and here on .

When I say they’re under appreciated, I’m considering the fact that nobody in my personal life who I am friends or family with has seen Inside Llewyn Davis and they’ve never even heard of A Serious Man. It’s easy to think they’re films everybody knows about when you discuss them here in film centric subs but they’re far more obscure to the general public than No Country, True Grit, Fargo, etc.

It’s a “dark comedy” about a midwestern jewish man who’s personal and professional life is crumbling around him. It’s a very mature film, I saw it with my mom when I was 14 and we both hated it. Written, directed, produced, and stars the Coen brothers, 110 minutes long.

Coming back from a week long Disney vacation is probably the best time to watch the movie.

Context:

I've seen most of the Coen Brothers' films and this one is one of the weirdest. I think the reason it struck me as so weird is because it is probably their most relatable (even if you aren't a Jewish professor in the 60s). Its not a western, there are no elaborate crimes or murders. Its just a down-to-earth family drama filled with mystery and plots that go nowhere. Out of all their films, this reminded me the most of The Big Lebowski (well, other than The Big Lebowski of course). The film was so much better than I expected and is absolutely worth the time of any fan of theirs that has yet to see it.

Straight from the Book of Job, this is a just man’s unjust suffering right down to the whirlwind at the end - but this time God is silent. When Larry goes looking for answers from the rabbis, he gets standard religious responses - issued with confidence but laughably insufficient. The first rabbi suggests Larry’s suffering is a matter of perspective – “look at the parking lot, Larry!”. Larry nails the conclusion himself – “The boss might not always be right, but he’s always the boss”. The second rabbi tells the story of the Goy’s teeth, and his point is excruciatingly frustrating: there are no answers and you’ll be happier if you stop asking. Each response makes him feel precisely zero better, while the third rabbi is as silent and inaccessible as God himself.

True evil is represented by Sy Ableman who says everything is fine when it isn’t, who offers superficial comfort while working to bring down Larry behind the scenes. It’s no accident that he adheres to religious niceties (he's the only character familiar with a Get) while stealing Larry’s wife. Shiny on the surface, evil underneath and the result is genuinely creepy – Sy is Satan, and perhaps represents the hypocrisy of religion itself. He is worse than the school bully who is at least up front, and in the final scene the bully, trumped by a higher power, stares wordlessly at the whirlwind and shows no interest in Danny.

Meanwhile Larry hasn’t realised that he has the answer all along. He teaches his physics class that reality is fundamentally inscrutable. The mathematics proves it. We can make up stories and fables (like Schrodinger’ cat) which illustrate it but don’t make the paradox go away. Just like the uncertainty principle, the more questions Larry asks, the more confused he becomes. He can shift the TV antenna but as one channel becomes clearer, another fades out.

While there may be no answer, there is a response. The third rabbi finally speaks - not from the Torah but from Jefferson Airplane. Hope will die and everything is lies – and what then? Yes, there is something – the line the rabbi leaves unspoken: “somebody to love”. He gives the boy his music back, a symbol all throughout of distraction and escapism, but something tangible that makes his life better and sends the boy away with the words “be good”. This wisest of the three rabbis has moved through all the learning and false comforts and confusion to reach the silence beyond, and its purified wisdom: love each other. And again Larry knew that all along. By the empty pool at the Jolly Roger, he comforts his wretchedly sobbing brother by simply holding him. There are no words. There are no answers. All we have is each other.

In the Coen Brothers' "A Serious Man" (2009), the junior rabbi advises Larry Gopnik, a husband and father whose wife is leaving him for another man from the synagogue, to look at the synagogue parking lot and "imagine [himself] a visitor, somebody who isn't familiar with these... autos and such... somebody still with a capacity for wonder... Someone with a fresh... perspective." The film clearly presents this advice as absurd and out of touch, but is it actually the most legitimate advice in the film? Is it actually quite good life advice?

Larry Gopnik faces a series of hurdles and tragedies that appear to be almost completely out of his control. At the mercy of the vicissitudes of fate, can he do anything more than take pleasure in the few good things around him? Can any of us do more than that?

UPDATE: Thanks for the comments everyone. This was a lot more interesting discussion than I expected from a thought I had while admiring a mostly empty parking lot in Phoenix. Keep 'em coming.

I've known about the existence of the Coen brothers film A Serious Man ever since it was released back in '09. I've never heard anyone bring up it up, even when talking about the Coen brothers filmography. Today, after finally getting a chance to watch it I'm wondering why. I thought it was fantastic, being drama about looking for meaning in philosophy and faith while also being darkly humorous. I want to know why people don't talk about this film more, and where people rank it in the Coen brothers anthology.

Last night I watched the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man for the first time. Never have I been so utterly bewildered by a film. By the final shot,--of a massive tornado threatening to engulf Larry Gopnik's son's Hebrew school--it had left unconsummated all the assumptions and predictions that I had developed about its themes in the first act. Not being Jewish or being particularly conversant with narratives from the Bible (like the Book of Job) did not help matters in the slightest. Needless to say, I did not catch most of what the Coens were trying to say with their movie before I turned to existing critical media.

One thing I did note, and which reading critiques of the film helped solidify--despite it not being touched upon in any of the reviews I read--was the use of communication and miscommunication to create drama and develop the theme of the inscrutability of God's actions. Throughout the film, information is either kept from the characters or is misinterpreted by them, which leads to them never being able to understand Hashem's will. A great example of the latter is found in the opening scene, the one with the Yiddish-speaking couple in the "Old Country". The wife, Dora, is so convinced that the man who helped her husband is a dybbuk that she stabs a guest her own husband invited in their house with an icepick. The dybbuk starts bleeding, proving both his mortality and the heinousness of the wife's act, but she remains unmoved, interpreting the relative slowness of the bleeding as a sign that Traitle Groshkever is indeed a dybbuk: "Blessed is the Lord. Good riddance to evil." The same basic idea is repeated throughout the film. Larry Gopnik, along with the doctor who found the Hebrew message in the Goy's teeth, are so convinced that the Lord is sending them signs from above, that they ignore the actual content of the message. The doctor does not make "help your fellow man" his creed despite chancing upon what was a possibly a divine command for him to do so. Larry lets go of his morals and accepts a bribe, and instantly receives a call with bad news.

Even the use of Hebrew in the movie furthers miscommunication. The second scene, the one with Danny at the Hebrew school consists almost entirely of the teacher speaking an ancient language to students who would rather be anywhere in the world but there. Danny certainly doesn't want to learn God's language: he's busy listening to music on his transistor radio. In the followig scene with the rabbi, Danny's attempts to explain how the gadget works are constantly shot down with a one word retort in Hebrew, "Ivrit."

Interruption is also a common motif in the film. I lost count of the number of times Larry was kept from finishing a sentence by someone trying to infantilise him: his wife, Sy Ableman, the guy on the tenure committee. This is clearly a factor leading to his crippling passivity and inferiority complex ("I haven't done anything!") as well as his constant refrain: "what's going on?" Has he been conditioned into meekly accepting his doormat status? Is this the reason for his passivity, his inaction, his need for God to serve him the answer to his problems?

It's not as if he doesn't try to open his mind to God's message. Larry makes a conscious effort to climb out of by the miasma of miscommunication he resides in, just as he climbs up to the roof of his home to fix the TV aerial. But before he can resume contact with the sky, the immorality in his heart pushes him back in: he suffers a sunburn while staring at his neighbour sunbathing in the nude, and accepts the bribe the Korean student offers him. In the end, the cycle consumes him.

I don't claim to fully understand this movie (far from it, in fact), so I'd really welcome any further examination of its intricacies, as well as your opinions on my observations.

I feel like it's one of the forgotten about Coen Brothers films. It came out right after No Country, and has a largely unknown cast. The performances were great, and I loved the philosophy of religion present in the film. The whole approach to life's meaning was really interesting, and I liked how darkly funny it was. It definitely ranks higher on the list of the Coen's best, and I urge anyone who is a fan to see it.