Movie Review: A Serious Man
The Coen brothers would like to be a filmic force to be reckoned with. In many ways they are; their direction is almost always impeccable, they paint their settings with a fantastical touch and create insular universes that are wonderfully funny and sickening. But what do they ask of their audience?
A Serious Man is a film about religion and pain. Joel and Ethan Coen grew up in the suburbs of Minneapolis and they have drawn on their own upbringing in this dark comedy. Physics professor, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) lives with his two bickering adolescent children, Danny (Aaron Wolf) and Sarah (Jessica McManus), his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) and his forlorn and disadvantaged brother, Arthur (Richard Kind). Larry’s life is thrown into disarray when Judith announces her intention to get a divorce. Her plan to subsequently marry the perpetually serious and patronising dullard Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed) sends Larry into an existential tailspin.
There is a certain science to the way the Coens go about dissecting Larry in this film, assaulting the undeserving protagonist with situations that lead him to endlessly question himself and his faith. Watching Larry fend off defeat after defeat is no easy task. Why is Sy Ableman a better man than Larry? The poor man turns to his faith in a search for an answer, visiting three rabbis in the hope that he will be able to pinpoint his place in God’s plan.
This movie makes you think and there are some thoroughly engaging set pieces, the best of which is a parable concerning a certain goy’s teeth. The recreation of the late 1960s is wondrous; cars, houses, hoses and hotels set a perfect backdrop for this tale of woe. The casting and acting is as brilliant as one would expect from a Coen movie. Stuhlbarg, a veteran of the stage, has really embraced his role as Larry and some of the incidental elderly cast play such magnificently unrefined, ugly and physical characters that they are beyond belief. As the Coen’s first autobiographical movie, A Serious Man stands tall as probably their most honest piece of work to date. But all these features, as important as they are, fade into the background when this film is observed in the context of what the Coens do.
While I’m not questioning their ability to make movies the psychology of these two men is bizarre. They have a back catalogue of quirky, witty, smart and severely cruel pieces of work. Their characters are deeply flawed and naive people, often treated by the filmmaker with contempt. Creating stories cloaked in comedy and fate, the Coen brothers tell us about losers who keep on losing. Perhaps their integrity would not be called into question if they didn’t do this with such startling consistency. Burn after Reading may have been a laugh riot, but the characters were not only unlikeable, they had no redeeming features whatsoever. Fargo and Barton Fink suffered from the same problem. The Coen world is one where the director is king. His subjects are stupider than he and they lack the sharp ruthlessness required to make it in the world. They are failures who exist only to be laughed and punishment and reward are randomly dealt.
A Serious Man is a clever movie, with dialogue that is full of life and characters that stay with you long after you leave the theatre, but it lacks respect.
I’m not sure that this is right.
