A Serious Man

// January 21st, 2010 // Film Reviews

{spoiler alert}

This week I watched A Serious Man (Coen brothers, 2009) and I’m still turning it around in my head and puzzling over aspects of the film. I enjoyed it at first viewing and have found that my enjoyment of it has increased in the hours that followed and with the luxury of reflection. However, I can see why some viewers would find watching it a frustrating and unsatisfying way to spend 2 hours. This review is full of plot spoilers and also probably won’t make complete sense if you haven’t seen the film.

Successful theatre actor Michael Stuhlbarg is cast as Larry Gopnik, our latter-day Job and principal protagonist. He excels in the role and I think it does wonders for the film in general that the star-heavy casting of Burn After Reading is shunned for far less ‘well-kent’ cinema faces. Other particularly notable work comes here from George Wyner as Rabbi Nachtner and Fred Melamed as Sy Ableman, although the acting from the entire cast is impeccable throughout.

The photography for the film is another masterclass from long-time Coen brothers collaborator Roger Deakins. Each scene is beautifully framed and naturalistically lit, with just a nod to hyperreality. Deakins has also done great work for other directors on such films as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The House of Sand and Fog, Kundun and Jarhead.

For the benefit of anyone who is unaware of the plot, A Serious Man is the story of an ordinary man’s search for clarity and meaning in a universe where, just lately, bad things keep happening to him for no apparent reason. It is late spring 1967, and Larry Gopnik, a physics professor at a quiet university in the US mid-west, has just been informed by his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) that she wants a divorce, or ‘get‘ as she puts it. She has ‘become very close’ with one of the family’s more pompous acquaintances, Sy Ableman, who seems to her to be a more substantial person, a serious man (or mensch) in comparison with Larry.

Larry’s unemployable oddball brother Arthur (Richard Kind), forever locked in the bathroom draining a sebaceous cyst on his neck, spends a lot of his time working on a hugely complex probability map for the universe, which he calls ‘The Mentaculus’. Larry’s son Danny (Aaron Wolff) is a weed-smoking idler at the local Hebrew school preparing for his bar mitzvah while continually sidestepping a $20 debt owed to his drug dealer classmate. Daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus), when she’s not fruitlessly waiting for Arthur to get out of the family bathroom (“I’ll be out in a minute!”), is stealing money from Larry’s wallet in order to save up for a nose job.

While his wife and Sy Ableman make new domestic arrangements Larry is forced to move out to The Jolly Roger motel with his brother. An anonymous hostile letter-writer is trying to ruin Larry’s chances for tenure at the university, alluding to his supposed ‘moral turpitude’. Also, a South Korean student is trying to bribe Larry for a passing grade in Physics while the student’s father threatens Larry with either a defamation lawsuit or an allegation of corruption, depending on whether the alleged bribe is accepted or not. The beautiful woman next door torments Larry by sunbathing nude and his other neighbour is brazenly encroaching over the boundaries between their properties with his lawnmower and his plans to build a boathouse. And so the pressures build on Larry’s shoulders. Struggling for explanations and direction, he seeks advice from three different rabbis. Hilarity ensues.

The film has many intriguing talking points but it is the opening sequence and, particularly, the ending that I find myself pondering about most. The film opens with a most perplexing prologue, entirely in Yiddish, set in a nineteenth century shtetl within what was then Russia and is now Poland. A man returns home to tell his wife he has met someone interesting on his trip back from the marketplace to sell geese, a respected elder that she knows. When he names the man however, her demeanour darkens. She proclaims that God has cursed them, insisting that this elder died three years previously of typhus and that her husband must have encountered a dybbuk. There’s a knock on the door and the husband reveals he has invited the man back for some soup. When the visitor refuses the soup, the wife takes it as proof that this really is a dybbuk (demons do not eat) and stabs him in the chest with an ice pick. At first the old man just stares at the wife, there is no blood and then he starts to laugh. We begin to think she may well have been right, but then, as the old man turns his attention to the husband we see his shirt begin to darken and, saying he does not feel well and knows where he is not welcome, the old man gets up and stumbles outside into the snow. The husband laments his ill fortune, while the wife, still apparently convinced that the visitor was already dead, tells him not to worry. The screen fades to black and the opening credits roll.

What are we to make of this? Later in the film, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and the paradox of Schrodinger’s cat are mentioned several times and I think this prologue should be viewed with these in mind. Once the old man has stumbled out into the snow, there can be no certainty as to whether he really was a dybbuk or if the couple have just murdered an innocent elderly man. The husband and wife’s future luck, or lack thereof, may or may not have anything to do with the incident, but the fact that they may believe that it does may push them towards making decisions based on an interpretation of the event that has no inherent meaning. No certainty.

So to the ending. Larry is in his office, his son Danny is in the classroom with his transistor radio listening to Jefferson Airplane‘s Somebody To Love. Arlen Finkle, the comically italicised man from the tenure committee standing in Larry’s doorway, has congratulated him on Danny’s successful bar mitzvah and hinted that Larry will be pleased with the forthcoming decision on his tenure. Danny is trying to repay the $20 he owes to his dealer. The universe is about to find balance. You feel the worst must have now passed for Larry. But then …. Larry opens a $3000 invoice from his retainered attorney and as the weight of his burdens finally break him he erases the F grade given to his blackmailing South Korean student and replaces it with first, a C grade, then after a 2 second consideration, a C minus to assuage his guilt. What happens next could be seen as a direct consequence of that damning afterthought. The phone rings immediately the minus is added to the C grade and Larry’s doctor then tells him that he’s cleared some time for him and needs to see him right away about Larry’s chest x-ray results (“How about right now? Now is good.”). Medically, it does not sound good for Larry at all. Then cut to the exterior of Danny’s school and the kids waiting outside the locked basement doors as their elderly teacher ineffectually fumbles with the keys and a giant tornado crawls ominously towards them …… roll credits.

Job 1:19 “And, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead”

You may view this type of open-ended closing sequence as thought-provoking and startling or, alternatively, you may think these fade-to-black Sopranos-style endings are all the rage because they tend to imbue the film-makers with a hue of genius where that hue may or may not be deserved. I personally felt that here it was a poignant and perfectly fitting way to close A Serious Man. Before those final five minutes the film seemed to point, depending on your religious inclinations, either to Jesus’s declaration that “God sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” or the fact that the universe is both chaotic and indifferent to the actions of human beings. Everything else is “mere surmise”. That ending throws you what I believe Americans call a ‘curve ball’.

“The Uncertainty Principle proves we can’t ever really know what’s going on. So it shouldn’t bother you, not being able to figure anything out.” Larry tells his students during a dream sequence. “Although you will be responsible for this on the midterm.” Life doesn’t make sense, but we’re still responsible for it, even if we had no idea what we were doing. Like killing a man thinking he’s a dybbuk, if he turns out not to be. Or when, by doing nothing, we become responsible for buying Santana’s Abraxas from the mail-order Columbia Record Club. Incidentally, the gnostic meaning of the word Abraxas as a God higher than the Christian God and Devil, that combines all opposites into one Being, can be viewed as interesting as Larry “does not want Abraxas, does not need Abraxas and will not listen to Abraxas”. Heap on more peculiarity as Santana did not release Abraxas until 1970, three years after this story takes place. The plot thickens.

The film has the feel of a parable, and the Yiddish prologue does much to set it up that way, but I think the ending purposefully denies it any sort of all-encompassing meaning, or much in the way of guidance beyond the message from Rashi that opened the film – Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you. Or, as the South Korean student’s father urges “Please. Accept mystery.”. A Serious Man is an extremely well-crafted and thought-provoking film which undoubtedly raises many more questions than it answers.