THE STORY – Larry Gopnik is a physics professor at a 1960s university, but his life is coming apart at the seams. His wife is leaving him, his jobless brother has moved in, and someone is trying to sabotage his chances for tenure. Larry seeks advice from three different rabbis, but whether anyone can help him overcome his many afflictions remains to be seen.
THE CAST – Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick, Aaron Wolff, Amy Landecker, Simon Helberg & Adam Arkin
THE TEAM – Joel Coen & Ethan Coen (Directors/Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 106 Minutes
The Coen Brothers’ fourteenth film, “A Serious Man,” opens with a prologue, which they themselves have claimed has no connection to the story of the rest of the film. That may have been true when they wrote it, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t connections between them or that it isn’t an ideal amuse-bouche for the brothers’ most personal film. Like the film that follows, it is ambiguous, a moral fable about a husband and wife in The Old Country who disagree about whether the houseguest invited by the husband in appreciation for helping him fix his broken cart in the snow is a dybbuk, a malicious spirit of Jewish myth that possesses the bodies of the dead. Though the wife stabs him in the heart with an ice pick, he doesn’t die, instead laughing and berating the husband, “One does a mitzvah, and this is the thanks one gets?” He then leaves the house out into the snowy night as the husband bemoans the fate that will befall them when the man’s body is discovered, and the wife stoically prays to God and closes the door on the evil that has left their house.
The film proper takes place in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, in 1967 – the very year Joel Coen turned thirteen, the age at which a Jewish boy becomes a man, reading from the Torah in a ceremony called a bar mitzvah. Sure enough, we open on thirteen-year-old Danny Gopnik (Aaron Wolff), listening to Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love” on a transistor radio in Hebrew school class. Our main character isn’t Danny, though; it’s his father. Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor at the local college, begins the film undergoing a medical exam, and things only get worse from there. After a Korean student tries to bribe him to change his failing grade, his wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), tells him that she wants a divorce and that she’s become romantically involved with their friend Sy Abelman (Fred Melamed), who is requesting that she receive a gett (a traditional Jewish divorce paper) so that she can remarry in the faith. To put it mildly, Larry’s world is falling apart. Rather, it has been falling apart for some time, and he’s only just become aware that it’s on its last legs.
Thus begins Larry’s spiritual crisis, which the Coens naturally frame as a black comedy of manners, constantly challenging Larry’s assimilationist “do-nothing” worldview with situations and people that demand he take action. The problem for him is that the actions he does take don’t seem to help much. Being a Jew, he naturally tries to see a Rabbi for help, but his congregation’s Junior Rabbi (Simon Helberg) can only offer platitudes about a parking lot; the Head Rabbi (George Wyner) tells him a story about a goy’s teeth that doesn’t seem to have a point and the wisest of all, the Rabbi Emeritus (Alan Mandell), isn’t seeing anybody. Meanwhile, his son has left him on the hook for a membership in the Columbia Record Club, his homeless brother Arthur (Richard Kind) has the cops after him, his wife emptied their bank account to pay for an expensive divorce lawyer, and worst of all for Danny, their television antenna can’t get a clear signal for “F Troop.”
Larry is a traditional sad-sack Jewish man, a meek man of letters who follows the rules and expects that to be enough. But in the 1960s, the world was changing rapidly, and all of that change converges on Larry in a way reminiscent of Job, the Old Testament figure upon whom God visited numerous atrocities to prove his faith, only to turn on him when it finally became too much. Like Job and generations of humans after, Larry wants to know why God would allow such bad things to happen to good people. But is Larry Gopnik a good person? He’s certainly sympathetic – Stuhlbarg’s masterful control over his body and voice provides some touching comedy as his facade slowly cracks and provides glimpses of the craziness he’s feeling on the inside as his life falls apart around him – but the Coens imply that he’s spent his adult life in something of a fugue state, blithely and somewhat naïvely going along with whatever happens. In order to be good, one has to do good, and as Larry protests throughout, he hasn’t done anything. He’s a moral blank slate, presented with situations that he can’t ignore that are forcing him to choose what kind of person he wants to be: Will he let his wife ruin him? Will he abandon his brother? Will he take the bribe?
The Coens’ brilliant screenplay can be read straightforwardly as a story of being Jewish in the American Midwest in the mid-to-late ‘60s, but it can also be read as an allegory for America during the period between WWII and Vietnam. Larry is both the archetypal Jewish male and a stand-in for the “old” America, one that didn’t involve itself in conflicts outside its borders. Through this lens, the film’s frustrating ending works best: As Larry gets some karmically bad news, Danny and his Hebrew school classmates watch a tornado form in front of them as they wait to be let into the school’s shelter. The tornado represents the future, the violence on the horizon that will change the country’s outlook and trajectory. But Larry doesn’t see it; he is too focused on his personal problems to notice what’s going on outside. It’s a metaphor that’s so relevant to the present day, sixteen years after the film’s release, that it feels prophetic.
In the hands of the Coens, though, “A Serious Man” never comes across quite as serious as it sounds. Yes, the brothers tackle big questions of morality and faith and include long discursions that only have allegorical significance (like the infamous story of the goy’s teeth), but they do so in the context of one of the funniest films they have ever written. The dialogue sparkles with their trademark wit and dark humor, and their editing (under the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes) has never been more sharply comedic. The film’s first sequence after the prologue, cross-cutting between Danny’s class and Larry’s medical exam, earns laughter from every single cut, and that’s just the first example of masterful cross-cutting on display here. While the film is undoubtedly funnier for members of the tribe, who have more first-hand experience with many of the stereotypes the film is lovingly poking fun at, it’s still a masterful comedy of errors as Larry continuously tries and fails to get a grip on any one of the myriad things happening to him.
In the role that catapulted him to the top of his field, Stuhlbarg is the perfect straight man to all the chaos happening around him. His face grows increasingly befuddled throughout the film, which is hilarious enough, but how he struggles to keep up with the speed at which everything is happening turns so many scenes into magic. Larry thinks he’s the one sane man in a world going crazy, but Stuhlbarg is smart enough to know that that’s not entirely the case, playing Larry as being in a state of particularly arrested development – witness the childlike puppy dog act he puts on for his hot-to-trot neighbor, Mrs. Samsky (a perfectly deadpan Amy Landecker). He’s a brilliant anchor, keeping the film from flying off the rails on numerous occasions through perfect tonal shifts.
The cast around him represents one of the triumphs of the Coens’ careers. No other directors have such a good eye and ear for their characters; even the smallest role in all their films is cast with the utmost care to have the exact right look and personality for their moment onscreen, no matter how small. Their work here is a home run, with characters eliciting laughs from just appearing onscreen (Claudia Wilkens as Rabbi Marshak’s secretary), sometimes even without a single line of dialogue (Michael Lerner as brilliant real estate attorney Solomon Schultz). Truly, no part in this film could have been played by anyone else with the same kind of impact; every single person on screen feels like they came straight out of a ‘60s Minnesotan synagogue on Friday night, and not just thanks to Mary Zophres’s customarily fantastic costume design and the impeccable work of the hair and makeup team. Everyone in “A Serious Man” has a face full of character, so much so that you know exactly who they are at a glance. Brilliant as the bit parts are, though, the casting of the main roles remains the coup de grâce. Kind inverts his exuberantly nebbishy persona into something deeply sad as Larry’s brilliant but socially awkward brother. Lennick’s straightforwardness perfectly captures the hard-nosed strength of Jewish women, somehow making Judith simultaneously sympathetic and hostile. Wolff brings the bar mitzvah boy to life with hilarious accuracy as he shambles through his big moment high out of his mind on marijuana. And then there’s Melamed as Sy Abelman. His big personality looms so large over the film that it’s easy to forget that his screen time doesn’t even amount to ten minutes. Sy cannot simply enter a room; he must make an entrance and control that room, and Melamed’s every move is perfectly calibrated to reach out and bring Larry close, only to slap him away with a sly throwaway comment gently. Sy Ableman is the kind of man who would give you the shirt off his back, but only because he wants you to know that he’s kind, and Melamed has that very specific kind of pomposity down pat, turning in a performance that manages to be both broad and subtle at the same time. He has some of the best dialogue in the film, but Melamed devours it with his singular voice like a hungry tiger. It’s the best kind of scenery chewing.
With “A Serious Man,” Joel and Ethan Coen reached back into their past and deep into their souls to deliver something so personal that it could only become universal. The film’s intimate knowledge of Jewish practices and people, not to mention its wrestling with the Jewish faith, can make it seem remote at first, and that mysterious prologue delivered entirely in Yiddish certainly doesn’t help matters. But the story unfolds with typical Coen-esque brio, with a new audio or visual joke in practically every other shot. It’s a perfectly constructed comedy of Jewish manners that doubles as an allegory for America’s own entrance into adulthood, and while it may take some effort to get fully on board, it repays that effort tenfold in solid, if slightly uncomfortable, entertainment. Because of all that, “A Serious Man” is nothing short of a Coen Brothers masterpiece.
