Cory Massimino

Review: A Serious Man (2009)

October 30, 2020 by Cory

★★★★★

On the heels of their second Best Picture winner and the uncharacteristically dramatic No Country For Old Men, the Coens returned to their comedic roots with a movie whose subtle wisdom and dark humor recalls The Big Lebowski, the movie made on the heels of their *first* Best Picture winner Fargo. The Coens always have something original to say, though. And “A Serious Man” often invokes more wildly different interpretations than many of their movies. Whether that’s a positive or negative depends on your perspective.

Also making a reappearance in their filmography, and elevated to its most prominent role yet, is Judaism. This is the most Jewish movie I’ve ever seen, in plot, characters, settings, and themes. While Jewish characters are often explored in the context of some of the most tragical historical injustices Jews have faced, this is a rare instance of a Jewish family that, while somewhat isolated in heartland America, is still able to live a relatively normal life.

This movie is often interpreted as something like modern retelling of the story of Job, and that certainly jives with past Coen projects like the Odyssey-inspired O’Brother Where Art Thou, but we shouldn’t let that narrow our reading(s). My wife suggested this is the story of Job *in a Godless world*. After all, the Coens are historically very concerned with nihilism and existentialism, especially in their very prior movie No Country For Old Men. Here, they take many of those same themes, situates them within the radically different context of 60s suburbia, adds a spice of theology, and blends it all together in the blackest of black comedies.

It’s worth noting Michael Stuhlbarg’s complex and layered, but nevertheless laugh-out-loud funny, performance that really carries this entire movie, uniting all the characters, plot threads, and themes into a straightforward story about a middle age Jewish man experiencing something of a crisis of faith. He captures a kind of neurotic paranoia and bleak defeatism so often found in media portrayals of Jews, but never in such a way as to overwhelm the viewer’s sympathy with irritation, only pity. That is, we never stop losing hope for him even when he loses hope for himself.

“A Serious Man” is something of an under-appreciated masterpiece. The Coens come as close as they ever have to autobiography with a story about a Jewish family living in 1960s suburban America. The Coens specifically set the Gopnik’s in their hometown St. Louis Park, Minnesota and include an older sister and numbers-focused professor father (replacing economics with physics) like they had. By partly rooting this movie in their experiences, the Coens gave it a more grounded feeling, but never at the cost of what Roger Ebert called “hallucinatory logic” in the context of The Big Lebowski.

This movie is best described as a darkly humorous meditation on happiness (or the lack thereof). It opens with a basically random and unexplained scene in which a 19th-century Jewish husband and wife disagree over whether or not the rabbi visiting them is an evil spirit known in Jewish folklore as a dybbuk. At first, the wife suggests they are cursed because of the appearance of the dybbuk, to which the husband reacts with skepticism. Then, after the wife stabs the rabbi and he leaves, she praises God and the husband becomes the one worried about their fate.

The Coens leave us to wonder about the relationship between this opening scene and the rest of the movie. Is it merely a humorous prologue drawing upon Jewish myth? Or is there a literal connection between these Eastern European Jews and the middle-America Jews the movie follows? Perhaps Larry is a descendent of this husband and wife, in which case either the curse the wife mentioned or a curse brought upon by her (potential) murder explains Larry and his brother’s bad fortune.

Maybe the Coens are just doing the cinematic equivalent of bluffing; giving the audience puzzle pieces for a puzzle which doesn’t actually fit together; cruelly pulling at the natural human tendency to *narrativize* — the very tendency which gave rise to the cinematic form. Maybe Larry’s suffering has nothing to do with the opening scene. Like the protagonist, we’re left with no answers, no explanations, no reasons. The movie doesn’t care about narrative anymore than life does, no matter how much we wish to frame each of them through that lens.

Ethan Coen’s philosophy background really comes to the forefront in this screenplay because so much of the dialogue is laden with ethical and theological issues, but in a funny, grounded way that conveys the central importance of philosophy and philosophical thinking in the project of human living, whether we explicitly articulate it as such or not. Like Larry we all rely on philosophy, even implicitly, to make sense of our experiences and find meaning in our lives. And when we start having problems making sense and finding meaning we, like Larry, would seek out new philosophical understanding with which to improve our lives.

Most of the scenes are literally just people at desks talking about life, whether in classrooms, offices, or synagogues. But the Coens know when to employ dynamic, even jarring, directing and framing and when to slow the camera down and passively observe. This makes even scenes of mundane discussions feel engaging, unique, and thought-provoking. And the omnipresence of ordinary settings doesn’t remotely stop Roger Deakins from delivering on his cinematography chops, who uses dreary lighting and coloring to mirror the dreariness of the characters’ inner lives. The Coens and Deakins bring to life the subjective experience of smoking pot in a notably impressive and downright hilarious way by groggily waving the camera around, slowing time, blurring the periphery of the screen, and drastically raising the volume of random sounds.

“A Serious Man” mostly consists in Larry desperately looking for answers. For guidance. For meaning. This predictably gets deep into the well of theology, as Larry looks to Jewish values and traditions for help. While he has always found some semblance of contentment in the “proofs” of mathematics and the precise certainty of the physics he teaches, the pressures of his crumbling marriage, ungrateful children, manipulative students (and their parents), unfriendly neighbors, callous lawyers, perplexing tenure committee, annoying subscription services, and platitude-filled rabbis all continually push Larry to the brink and slowly exhaust his will to live. He is ultimately struggling with the silence of God; a silence which takes all the color out of each facet of life.

At his lowest, Larry is single, living in a motel, being blackmailed by a disgruntled student, losing credibility with the tenure committee due to anonymous letters, drowning in legal fees and funeral expenses, and showing up to work half-shaven and disheveled. But even then, as Larry’s unemployed, anti-social, closeted brother who spends nearly all his time draining the enormous cyst on the back of his neck and none of his time complaining, so heartbreakingly conveys, Larry at least has a family and a job.

There are a series of events late in the film that seem to gradually expose Larry to new ways of thinking, alter his mindset, and help him rediscover an appreciation for the good things in his life:

1) He spends an afternoon getting high with the seductive, transgressive neighbor he first saw earlier sunbathing naked and finds new wisdom in the first rabbi’s hilariously mundane advice about finding new “perspective.” I love the prominence of orange in these scenes, covering the neighbor’s clothes, walls, and furniture. Orange is kind of a transgressive, intrusive color; one which doesn’t exactly possess the anger and alarmism of red but does combine red’s eye-catching excitement and passion with the comforting, warm allure of yellow. This experience is brief but I think the first of many that help Larry realize he’s simply been thinking too small and allowed himself to be psychologically constrained by the box of his suburban living and mundane, ordinary life — of course that’s just one perspective; a perspective which get seriously challenged in a subsequent scene when Larry is reminded of the equally true fact that having family is a sacred privilege. He can’t exactly just go back to smoking pot all day, even if that happens to be a prime interest for someone his teenage son’s age.

2) He tries to comfort his panicking brother with the same advice he should give himself about not blaming God and, essentially, reiterating the quote that opened the movie about receiving things with simplicity. I also quite like the symbolism employed here with Larry and his brother arguing about life’s unfairness in the motel’s empty pool, which reads to me like a sort of ironic twist on the longstanding use of water (and one’s immersion in it) to symbolize a kind of spiritual transformation or rejuvenation — a symbol the Coens use extensively in O’ Brother Where Art Thou. But here, the pool is empty and the lack of water illustrates the fact that, at least in the world of “A Serious Man,” spiritual rebirth, assuming it’s possible at all, can only be achieved within.

3) He has a nightmare in which he awkwardly explains the uncertainty principle to a class of disinterested students before an apparently revived Sy challenges him on *his* certainty, attacks him, and taunts him. The shot of the impossibly large, equation-filled black board dwarfing a befuddled Larry is one of my favorite shots in any movie ever. It hilariously draws parallels between Larry’s scientific methods and his brother’s “probability map” called the Mentaculus, neither of which seem to offer much in the way of real hope. If movie’s have any equivalent to thesis statements in writing, this movie’s thesis statement is that shot.

4) He has what starts out as a dream in which he uses the bribe money for good by helping his brother sail off to a new life of freedom (on a lake of gleaming *water*!) but which then turns into a nightmare in which he and his brother are hunted by his other neighbor (and son) for being Jews. I think this reflects the lack of storybook ending here. It’s not like Larry can just go somewhere else and start a new life. Yes, because anti-semitism is certainly a thing! But also because of the mere fact that the absurd exists wherever you are.

5) He enjoys the climactic bat mitzvah of his son which functions as the rare special occasion of togetherness for the family — even spurring his wife to apologize for all the tension. In the end, it’s ironically this Jewish tradition that does restore some meaning in Larry’s life. It takes his mind off the “toothache” of spiritual frustration that the second rabbi mentioned. Larry and his wife’s faces gleam with pride and happiness; this event is much more for them than their son — who is probably so high he will barely remember it anyway. These experiences are fleeting, as all experiences are. But as Larry says in the subsequent scene in which he gets the rare good news that he will earn tenure, “I will” (not “I am”) is the proper response to being reminded to savor something good.

Larry finally manages to achieve some sense of contentment; a temporary peaceful respite from his constant self-pity, pessimism, and neuroticism. But sadly this respite *is* temporary. There is no happy ending here. That spiritual toothache inevitably returns. The movie began with a montage showing Larry undergoing a physical exam and after 90 minutes of Larry undergoing a spiritual exam he gets an ominous call from the doctor about coming in to see some x-rays. Now maybe we are making the very same mistake as Larry by assuming the absolute worst! But either way, we know from Larry’s facial expression and voice that his days of spiritual frustration are not behind him, if anyone can ever even achieve such a thing.

And perhaps most tragic is the responsibility Larry seems to bear in this. As he sees at the beginning there are “always consequences for actions… in this office.” While that could initially have been read as something of a self-aware jab at Larry’s desperate longing for meaning in an indifferent universe, the end of the movie puts things in new light. The instant Larry succumbs to the pressures of his bad fortune and finally changes his student’s grade for money is the instant the phone rings with the (presumably) bad health news. Not everything that happens to him is all his fault, but maybe Larry is more a victim of a karmic universe than an uncaring one.

Then again, maybe the Coens are again fooling us into doing exactly what “A Serious Man” spent the prior 90 minutes warning against: looking for meaning where there isn’t any. Maybe it’s just a random coincidence that the phone rang once Larry accepted the bribe. Maybe we are, like Larry, yet again giving into the human tendency to narrativize everything. Maybe the universe is better described as chaotic and comedic (or tragic?) rather than rational and serious.

“A Serious Man” does try to offer some bit of wisdom (beyond the not-so-helpful insight that there simply isn’t any) in the parallel plot line that follows Larry’s teenage son, Danny, whose everyday concerns mostly involve watching F-Troop, acquiring pot, running from school bullies, and getting back his radio from the principal. In the climax, after Danny performs his bat mitzvah ceremony stoned out of his mind, he gets to see rabbi Marshak, the oldest, wisest rabbi that Larry has spent the whole movie trying and failing to see (and perhaps something of a metaphor for a God who finally breaks his silence but not to Larry). All this build up for Marshak’s character hilariously pays off in him merely repeating the opening lines of the movie: Jefferson Airplane’s lyrics “when the truth is found to be lies and all the joy within you dies, don’t you want somebody to love.”

He gives Danny back his radio (how he got it, we’ll never know) and tells him to be a “good boy.” So maybe we shouldn’t be aspire to be a “rational man” like the Jewish husband in the opening scene claims to be. And maybe we shouldn’t aspire to be a “serious man” like Sy claims to be and which Larry desperately tries to be later on. Maybe we should merely aspire to be “good boys,” accept the miraculous return of our radios with the same simplicity as the arrival of deadly tornados (or bad health news), and at least look for some love when we can’t find truth or joy.

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