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The Coen Brother’s new film, A Serious Man, is a story of a very bad, terribly awful, bafflingly catastrophic day, followed by more of the same. And all of it happens to quite the affable chap, too. He’s honest, he’s “tried to be a serious man,” he even is willing to fund the funeral of his wife’s lover. But Karma doesn’t hold rank in this world. Somehow on the wrong end of the shooting range is Larry Gopnik (played expertly by Michael Stuhlbarg), pants hiked up 4 inches too high, eye glasses perched perfectly on the bridge of his nose, hands scribbling undecipherable physics theorems on a blackboard facing a room full of bewildered students. Larry has, up until two weeks before his son’s Bar Mitzvah, led a relatively smooth life: he has a family – a wife and two children, a job in which he’s up for tenure, and a community of fellow-Jews that support him when times get rough. And boy do times get rough. However, the Coen Brothers succeed in inserting a level of levity to the overall calamity that ensues, and even more so, succeed in creating a climate of universality of human experience in the face of modernity, Jewish or not. A Serious Man asserts the utter un-knowability in the world, while emphasizing that it has been this way for all of time, will continue to be this way, and thus is no cause for panic. What might have become a terrible downcast film, somehow triumphs as a celebration of the mystery of a person’s life.

Maybe I should back up a bit, and preface the rest of my discussion of this seriously Jewish movie, as many reviewers of the film have been occupied by the question of Jewish or Not-Jewish. I myself was raised Jewish. Not strictly religious, but culturally – so I get the jokes in A Serious Man. Most of the Jewish quips and glancing references managed to find a comfy home in my fuzzy memories of Jewish Center upbringing. That said, I feel strongly that there is just more to it than the question of Jewish or not Jewish. Yes, Larry Gopnik is, in fact, Jewish, and yes, much of the movie chronicles his visits to various Rabbis in desperate quest for advice in the face of hardship. However, problems in the work place, and problems at home, as well as all of the other calamities Larry encounters, are hardly Jewish problems specifically (and a propensity to turn to religious faith in the face of hardship is hardly a Jewish thing either).

One of the ways that the Coen brothers execute an overtly specific plot with universal appeal is through casting. By casting relatively unknown actors throughout the film, the audience is given a unique chance to watch these actors as the flawed characters they inhabit on screen, as opposed to their picture-perfect personas we associate them with off-screen. (In the Coens’ 2008 Burn after Reading, it was easy to fixate on Brad Pitt, Brad Pitt, Brad Pitt, playing an idiot with a strange dye-job, and George Clooney, and everyone else, constantly saying “fucker” and how strange that was.) In A Serious Man, the biggest name on the roster is Richard Kind, who plays Larry’s autistic brother Arthur, a leech type character who is living on Larry’s couch, scribbling numbers and letters maniacally in his Mentaculus, a notebook that will predict the future of the world one day, or just win him some cash in a gambling circle. The world the Coens create is inescapable, and this effect is furthered by the actors they chose – we are enveloped in their character as a reality, as opposed to their execution of lines in carrying out a particular role. The suburban houses, the geometric plots of land, the lines in between property that Larry obsesses over – all of these location details serve to further implant the audience in the world of 1976 Minnesota.

In one scene, Larry has to scale his roof in order to adjust the satellite, after all, “F Troop” is fuzzy and Larry’s 13 year old son, Danny, can’t possibly allow that. Tip-toeing up the incline, with that same awkward gate we’ve seen Larry take up before, he makes his way to the top, but is suddenly distracted. His neighbor, Ms. Sansky, is sunbathing in the nude. And if he gets just a little bit closer, he can maybe peer over that 6 foot high white fence. He looks at her like a small boy would look through the peep hole to the girl’s locker room: with complete wonder. It makes us think: when’s the last time this guy’s seen a naked woman? Maybe these are the problems his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) is speaking of when she tells him she wants a divorce. A strikingly hysterical vision is a centered shot of Larry, looking like a silly Dinosaur, arms perched at his side as if he’d love to reach out and touch her but is too afraid, head tilted up in total mesmerized intrigue at the sight. He stares for a few moments, getting closer…. closer….. she’s bound to catch him looking! For just a moment we are Larry, spying on this unattainable creature. We can’t help but hope he doesn’t get caught, a mishap that would only add to the problems and embarrassments in poor Larry Gopnik’s life. Just in time, Larry is stirred from his revelry by the blinding, burning sun. In this scene, Larry manages to gain some points from me. Poor guy: he’s like a child, completely caught off guard by everything: his wife, sexuality, temptation, desire. Larry’s whole shtick (that’s Yiddish for… shtick) is just a bit more believable because our perceptions of his hardships and anxieties on-screen aren’t clouded by the fact that we know, off-screen, in real life, he’s got it all. (I call this the Brad Pitt effect – a suffering on-screen-Brad, in a movie like Babel for example, just doesn’t quite translate to me – come on! Brad Pitt is just fine. I have a hard time believing his execution of a hard-time-having character because my perception of him is so completely impacted by all the US Weekly dirt I know about his life). Through casting unfamiliar actors in these roles, the Coen brothers create a universality and relateability to the experiences of the characters on screen.

Throughout the film, amidst countless Jewish references and strictly Jewish worries (the Bar Mitzvah, getting into seeing the Rabbi), all enacted by extremely convincing actors, the Coen brothers present a theme: it’s always been this way, and so we shouldn’t just roll over in the face of troubles. Even the first Larry-centric sequence of the film emphasizes inter-relatedness, as scenes of Danny’s Hebrew School classroom are inter-cut with Larry’s visit to the doctor. Are we viewing Larry as a child in memories? Turns out no, but it could have been viewed as such. The first shot is of a tiny light in the distance (a light at the end of the tunnel perhaps? Hardly.). We approach this light with such speed that it seems as though we are about to leap out of a dark well. Instead, we realize we have been traveling through Danny’s ear canals, a connective image in of itself. Backtrack to the previous scene, the Yiddish parable, and we are watching a centuries-old tale unfold in which a dybbuk (a potential demon, we never really find out) is stabbed. The wife, who is convinced that this man was in fact a dybbuk, and thus a portent of evil, is relieved, and closes the door murmuring good riddance to all evil, while the husband is left horrified at what she has done. Was this a dybbuk? Or was he just an old Rabbi now left to die? We never know, and there’s no way to know – the Coens don’t tell us. They immediately set the scene for a climate of universal suffering, and universal ambiguity. This question-and-answer duality persists throughout the whole of the film. “What’s going on?” – usually a question posed by Larry to his children – is the most restated line of the movie. The answer is always, inevitably, ‘nothing.’ Or worse, his children offer him no answer at all.

In the story of the Goy’s Teeth, in which a Jewish dentist finds the message “Help me, save me” inscribed in Hebrew onto the back’s of a Goy (non-Jewish) man’s teeth, the dentist, just like Larry came to the Rabbi desperately seeking help and answers (Why me? What does it mean?) He sat precisely where Larry then sits, listening to the Rabbi recount the tale. What happened to the doctor in the end? What happened to the Goy? What’s the point of this tale? We don’t know! The Rabbi says simply: “Hashem hasn’t told me” with an innocent shrug of his shoulders. The resolution to this tale may be laughably frustrating, but the idea that people have sat in the same chairs (literal, abstract, both) before, seeking the same guidance, wondering the same things, only to be met with the same answers of unknowability serves to speak to the audience as well. We, too, are seeking answers, and we too will be thwarted in the end. The Coens achieve in frustrating our desires, and by doing so, they involve us in Larry’s life and quest for answers in a way that many films don’t manage. They relate Larry’s singular experience to all of us, and they expand it almost as if they are using Larry as the diagram of all human experience, filled with intention, temptation, hardship and confusion. Evil exists, and sometimes, it knocks on your door (as it did literally in the parable, and figuratively in Larry’s life). How shall we know why it came and when it will leave? There’s no way, and it’s nothing to worry about.

Somehow, three decades later from the film’s 1976 setting, we still relate to Larry’s situation. He’s the ultimate under-dog, the type everyone can see a bit of themselves in, with his inconsolable struggles. I saw the movie with three non-Jewish friends. We all chuckled at the jokes, and winced at Larry’s poor misfortunes. Representing suffering as not only as a given – but as a universal given, is very appealing. And the fact that Larry is not delivered to safety and enlightenment at the end of the film teaches us an important lesson. Larry is constantly saying, almost defensively, that he hasn’t ‘done anything.’ Is this the answer, then? Be active in life? Truth is we’ll never know, but as the Second Rabbi said, “it couldn’t hurt.” At the end of the film, with the tornado approaching from the distance, my friends and I all shook our heads. Of course. How else could it end? It’s rare that a film benefits from an untidy finish sans outcome or answer. But would an answer have been overly placating? Yes. Imminent Doom. That’s the meaning to the film’s end. But it’s alright. We’re all in it together.

A Serious Man
directed by Ethan and Joel Coen,
The Charles
1711 N. Charles
Baltimore, MD
Playing through Thursday, December 10^th.

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