Film review: A Serious Man

Published on Saturday 14 November 2009 13:56

A SERIOUS MAN (15)

Directors: Ethan and Joel Coen

Running time: 105 minutes

***

THOSE aesthetic wiseacres the Coen brothers seem to have been inspired by their roots for their latest movie. A Serious Man is set in 1967 Minnesota – a time and place that echoes Joel and Ethan's teenage years as sons of Jewish academics. But you don't know the Coens if you were expecting a warm memoir.

Odd, cerebral and sometimes bleaker than a fire in a pet shop, A Serious Man is a dark comedy about human suffering that puts sentiment to the sword.

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) may be the most mundane focus of a Coen brothers' movie: a nebbish physics professor for whom life takes a turn for the worse. His bored wife Judith (Sari Lennick) is leaving him for a pretentious neighbour (Fred Melamed). His unemployed brother Arthur (Richard Kind) takes up residence on the couch and bathroom, where he continually drains a suppurating cyst. Larry's boss hints his job may not be secure just as someone sends poison-pen letters to the tenure committee. Could they be from the disgruntled Korean student (David Kang) whose bribe Larry earlier turned down?

Back at home, instead of studying for his bar mitzvah, Larry's son Danny (Aaron Wolff) is smoking pot, stealing money and, worst of all, listening to Jefferson Airplane. And his sister Sarah (Jessica McManus) is filching money from Larry's wallet to fund a nose job. The only escape from this misery seems to exist in the sinful form of the attractive woman next door (Amy Landecker), who smokes dope and sunbathes nude.

In short, Larry is having his patience tested like Job, except with the Coens playing God. Why me, asks Larry, and seeks out three rabbis for an explanation as to why he's suddenly become a cosmic dumping ground. Instead, he's given a load of platitudes, including an entertaining anecdote about a gentile unaware he has a Hebrew cry for help engraved on his teeth. One rabbi won't see Larry. Even God can't be bothered.

"Accept the mystery," one character urges Larry. I think the Coens are hoping we'll do the same, as searching for the film's meaning can be frustrating. At the start, for instance, there's a digression in Yiddish where a couple of Larry's ancestors encounter a rabbi friend who is supposed to have died days earlier. The husband welcomes him in, but his wife suspects a demon has taken up residence in the deceased rabbi's body, and acts accordingly. It's nicely told, but seems separate from the rest of the story.

I like the Coens, but sometimes they get too wrapped up in the moments they're creating. Sequences run too long, or end abruptly. Stuhlbarg holds his character together but the harder Larry searches for meaning in his life, the more random his misfortunes seem. He's not really like Job; he's more a man who commits the sin of being oblivious to wife and family. Larry could do less suffering. He could even take the advice of his son's Jefferson Airplane track: "When the truth is found to be lies/And all the joy within you dies/Don't you want somebody to love."

This film won't increase Coen fanclub numbers. And the jokey assurance "No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture" at the end will leave people pleasantly baffled.

Cinemas nationwide from Friday

This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 15/11/09