Review: A Serious Man

Written and directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen. Released by Focus Features.

The middle of the decade found the Coens in something of a rut. Intolerable Cruelty was poorly received, although I found it amusing, and The Ladykillers is indisputably the worst film of their career. After taking a few years off, though, they returned with a couple of fine films, and A Serious Man finds them still on a roll with one of the best films of their career.

The film is about Larry Gopnik (played by Michael Stuhlbarg), a Jewish professor from suburban Minneapolis whose life is crumbling around him. His wife announces that she’s fallen in love with a neighbor and wants a divorce, he’s having problems at work, and his aimless and socially inept brother won’t move out of his house. He’s fearful of his Gentile neighbors, and he’s mortgaged to the hilt so money is tight. And to top it all off, his TV reception is fuzzy.

Larry’s response to his troubles is to seek wisdom from the rabbis, and the intersection of his misery and religion form the heart of the film. He wonders why he is earmarked for such suffering when he’s been trying so hard to be a good, serious man, while the rabbis do their cheerful best to remind him that just maybe he isn’t meant to know. “Accept the mystery,” one character tells him, and even though the line comes in a different context, it serves as the most straightforward statement of the film’s guiding ethos.

The Coens have always had an arch sense of humor, and that’s perhaps more true than ever with this film. In some ways, Larry bears some resemblance to Jerry Lundegaard, William H. Macy’s character from Fargo, in that they both always seem about to explode as their bad luck continues to accumulate. Larry is a much more sympathetic and complex character, of course, but as with Jerry, the Coens seem to take some perverse pleasure in watching him squirm. If there’s one constant in their career, it’s the humor to be found in watching the best laid plans go awry. More so than their other films, however, the best laid plans this time around have a more existential bent. Who is Larry, if he is not who he thought he was?

In terms of casting, the Coens take a much different approach than they have lately, with no big-name actors in the cast and only one, Richard Kind as Larry’s misfit brother, that I even recognized (aside from a cameo by Fyvush Finkel, although I didn’t exactly “recognize” him). Stuhlbarg is excellent, balancing a sympathetic portrayal of his character with the movie’s not-so-vague sense that Larry is missing the forest for the trees. Another standout is Fred Melamed as the worst kind of asshole – the kind that is easily able to convince the world that he’s a deeply decent fellow, even while looking someone in the eye and stabbing them in the chest.

With No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading, and now A Serious Man, the Coens have made a trilogy of sorts that reflects an uneasiness that has been central to the American experience during the Aughts.  No Country warned of the consequences of unchecked arrogance, and Burn disguised seething rage against American intelligence services behind a dopey violent farce. Now comes A Serious Man, which openly asks how “serious” American middle-class priorities can really be considered to be. If the film’s ominous ending gives any clue to the answer, it’s “not so much.”