Film review: A Serious Man

Published on Thursday 19 November 2009 20:54

DIRECTED BY: JOEL COEN, ETHAN COEN *** STARRING: MICHAEL STUHLBARG, RICHARD KIND, FRED MELAMED, SARI LENNICK, AARON WOLFF

LEAVE it to Joel and Ethan Coen to transform their most autobiographical film to date into one of their bleakest, coldest and least heartfelt. Set in the uniformly bland, enclosed Minneapolis suburb of St Louis Park in 1967, A Serious Man recreates an era straight out of the brothers' childhood and proceeds to use it as the backdrop for an intricately plotted theatre of cruelty that rejects nostalgia and sentiment for caricature and contempt.

An update of sorts of the biblical story of Job, it makes a mockery of faith, divine intervention, scientific reason and hippie spiritualism to sarcastically undermine the notion that there's a knowable order to the universe, something that will explain and give meaning to the ongoing series of random calamities that constitute life.

The calamities in this case belong to Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a Jewish physics professor tentatively awaiting tenure who finds his life suddenly unravelling around him. He's already burdened by the semi-permanent presence of his troubled, bathroom-hogging brother Arthur (Richard Kind), and when his wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), announces out of the blue that she wants a divorce, it seems to catalyse a chain reaction of mini miseries that threaten to destroy the respectable, white-collar, middle-class existence with which he has grown content.

His bigoted neighbour (Peter Breimayer) has started brazenly appropriating land from his garden for his own use; his bratty children (Aaron Wokff and Jessica McManus) are secretly stealing cash from his wallet to fund a nose job (his daughter) and a reefer habit (his son); a passive-aggressive South Korean student is attempting to bribe him into giving him a passing grade; his wife's new romantic interest is putting pressure on him to move out of his own home; mounting legal bills connected to the divorce are threatening to bankrupt him; a mail-order record company is hounding him for album purchases he's never made, and, to top it off, someone is sending anonymous letters to the tenure board denouncing his character.

Fundamentally a decent man, Larry doesn't understand why he's being punished in this way, especially since, in his own increasingly frustrated words, he "hasn't done anything". Determined to get an explanation, he embarks on a fraught spiritual quest. Answers, however, aren't exactly forthcoming from the series of rabbis he consults, who tend to fob him off with "that's life" platitudes and, in one case, an amusingly inconclusive tale of a Jewish dentist who finds a message from God etched in Hebrew on the teeth of a patient.

Answers aren't exactly forthcoming from the film either. Rooted in Yiddish folklore and language so arcane that even its characters don't always understand it, it's one of the most insular, least accessible films the Coens have made and the chances are you'll echo Larry's frequently perplexed inquiry of "a what?" whenever references are made to "Dybbuks", "goys", "shtetls", "getts" and "Agunahs".

The Coens drop us straight into this world with a way-back-when prologue involving superstitious eastern European villagers and a possible curse brought on by a misguided stabbing, though what bearing this has on Larry's subsequent woes is anyone's guess. Given the Coen brothers' fondness for obfuscation, probably none. Indeed, this film, more than any other in their back catalogue, appears to be the closest they've come to admitting that they're really just master pranksters, content to invite us to enter into a world of pain in which they can give us the runaround with their sometimes brilliant, sometimes maddening insincerity.

In this instance, the film's rigorous structure and tightly controlled storytelling is part of the joke. It's a film about a lack of order, which is something the Coen brothers just don't do. They don't freestyle or improvise. Every detail is written into the script; every camera shot, every soundtrack choice, every line of dialogue is precisely designed to suggest an intricate code that, if cracked, will unlock the secrets of their cinematic universe.

But just as Larry admits he is unable to explain in any real sense how Schrdinger's Cat dies, despite his ability to illustrate with elaborate, blackboard-filling equations the theoretical mathematics behind this famous scientific paradox, any serious search for meaning in A Serious Man is liable to result in a similar sense of exasperation.

This is a film, after all, that sardonically equates the profundity of Judaism with the lyrics to Jefferson Airplane's Somebody to Love and, after laying on a multitude of narrative diversions, comes to the conclusion that the only certainties in life are death and – in an amusing spin on the old taxes chestnut – enormous legal fees.

Having encouraged us to see through their ruse, however, A Serious Man also leaves a gaping void where our sense of enjoyment should be. Though well acted, the characters aren't as fully formed as some of the Coens' other original creations. Larry's too passive to be truly engaging and those surrounding him are too stereotyped and buffoonish to offset his inaction. It's like the darker, uglier flipside to Burn After Reading and it screams out for a character like Madge Gunderson from Fargo or The Dude from The Big Lebowski (still the gold standards of the Coen brothers' ouvre).

Not vintage Coen brothers then, but they're still filmmakers to love, even if they sometimes make it increasingly difficult to do so.

CRITIC'S CHOICE

O for Orson

Edinburgh Filmhouse, until 10 December

YOU don't need many excuses to run an Orson Welles season, but with Richard Linklater's wonderful Me and Orson Welles hitting cinemas next month, the big man's body of work is getting a timely run through at the Filmhouse. Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons have been and gone, but The Lady from Shanghai, Macbeth, The Trial and the excellent Touch of Evil are still to come.

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