An extensive knowledge of Yiddish parables, Hebrew iconography and quantum physics isn’t an explicit requirement to view the new film by Joel and Ethan Coen, A Serious Man. But in fairness to the audience, it really should be.
After critical and commercial success with the revered No Country for Old Men and the crowd-pleasing Burn After Reading, the Coens have produced a film nobody knows where to place, either in their filmography or in terms of genre.
Like much of their oeuvre, the film contains a murder. The bloodshed is not via woodchipper or Javier Bardem, but rather via a Jewish housewife. In fact, the act is the climax of a Yiddish folk story about an Eastern European Jewish couple who stabs a traveling scholar who may or may not be an evil spirit.
Nearly a century later, we are presented with the family of Minnesotan physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg, Cold Souls). From the outside, the Gopniks appear to be bland, comfortable members of suburban Jewry.
Reality and the Coen brothers’ tight camera, however, show Larry’s family inexorably crumbling. His wife Judith (newcomer Sari Lennick), at the urging of her oily, pretension-oozing lover Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed, Hollywood Ending), demands a get, a traditional Jewish divorce.
His oddly freckled teenage son Danny (newcomer Aaron Wolff) does go to Hebrew school but spends his time either getting high or, even worse, listening to 1960s psychedelia linchpin Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love.”
Meanwhile, his borderline-deranged, ailing brother Arthur (Richard Kind, Lightbulb) sits in Larry’s bathroom draining a cyst on the back of his neck. He constantly tests the limits of Larry’s patience and serves almost as a cruel reminder to Larry of how much worse his life could be.
To help figure out why the universe, or more specifically Hashem, keeps trying a good, reasonable man — a mensch like him — Larry turns to a series of rabbis. Their names (Scott, Natchner and Marshak) are flashed on title cards as a booming bass sounds, cheekily casting them as some sort of mini-gods to be awed and feared.
It would be unfair and shortsighted to label A Serious Man a send-up of late ’60s American Jewish culture or the chosen people’s history. The Coen brothers went to great lengths to nail both the Yiddish at the beginning and the various bits of Hebrew writing thrown into the film as clues for the savvy.
Moreover, Stuhlbarg, though he’s playing a comic archetype more welcome in a Woody Allen film, never loses sight of his character’s goodly essence. His silly workplace travails — attempted bribery by a student, a tenuous chance at achieving tenure — stay funny without being distractingly leavening. Stuhlberg’s performance is so whole one can almost hear him gulp and see worry manifested on his face.
Larry’s default reaction to yet another bit of bad news is to meekly ask, “What? What are you talking about?” There are existential pangs in such lines, but this is no American Beauty. The audience can wait forever for some sort of truth, a lightning strike of clarity to hit Larry, but it will never come.
What does remain clear is the importance of Jefferson Airplane, Schrödinger’s Cat, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the phrase “a serious man,” first uttered at Sy Ableman’s funeral. The disparity inherent in combining those subjects suggests some sort of cosmic joke at the viewer’s expense.
Yet, there is something elusive and extremely serious buried in the film. Even after an act of deus ex machina bravado at the end, the Coen brothers’ semi-autobiographical tale retains a metaphysical quality. The bare thread of Heisenberg’s theory is the inability to know. Larry’s quest for answers, along with a shockingly funny incident involving a highly respected rabbi at the conclusion, only reinforces this idea of the world actually existing in an absurd, invisible dimension of which we are all victims.
Just as Larry will never know why things happen to him, the general audience will likely never be able to explain the random symbols at the edge of the frame or even the ending.
Maybe the lonely, forgotten physics professor, who ends up living in a motel room, can find some answers from Jefferson Airplane: “When the truth is found to be lies / and all the joy within you dies / don’t you want somebody to love?”
vmain13@umdbk.com
RATING: 4.5 out of 5 stars
