Yesterday, A Serious Man came to DVD. Two weeks ago, I paid to see it in theaters. That may seem silly, knowing if I just held off a little longer I could have just Netflixed it, but I stand by my choice. Not only did it allow me to be 9 for 10 on best picture nominees last week, but I was able to see how people reacted in the theater. Instead of the theater laughing all at once, I would find myself laughing alone at some parts, and others laughing alone later. And others probably weren't laughing at all. Which is why this has been one of the more debated movies of 2009. Some people responded to it, and some people didn't.
Jewish physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) seems to be living a good life, but all of a sudden things begin to rapidly unravel for him. His wife (Sari Lennick) announces out of nowhere that she's leaving him for smooth-voiced widower Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), the titular serious man whose insistence on handling things "like adults" just make him all the more obnoxious. Larry's brother (Richard Kind) shows no signs of looking for an apartment as he spends all his time in Larry's bathroom draining a cyst. A Korean student is bribing him to change a grade. The Columbia record club is hounding him for payments on records he never ordered. Oh, and people keep dying right in front of him.
If all of this doesn't sound quite as bad as what happened to Job, Larry's biblical precedent, it's not. In fact, a lot of what happens to Larry happens less to him and more around him, a maelstrom of ridiculousness to which Larry is forced to observe. But as in the story of Job, the central question is why? The script is structured by Larry's meetings with three rabbis - young, older, and oldest - through whom he tries to seek some guidance. The best visit is the second, in which the rabbi tells an elaborate story that, while amusing, doesn't seem to actually have a lesson, much to Larry's frustration. In fact the story does have a moral, one shared by the movie: sometimes there are no answers. Which may make this one of the most Jewish movies ever made.
It's not just all the rabbis and Hebrew that makes people call this Joel and Ethan Coens' most personal movie yet. Set in a close-knit Jewish community in the 1960s, the characters here live much as the Coens must have growing up in Minnesota. And they truly do nail that world. Looking at the washed-over colors and drab architecture, it's amazing how similar it looks to pictures of the era my parents grew up in.
They also really understand what it was like growing up in that world, often to hilarious effect. Many of the funniest moments surround Larry's son, who listens to Jefferson Airplane on a walkman in Hebrew School while his teacher drones on about Hebrew verb conjugation and goes to his own Bar Mitzvah while stoned. There's the way everyone's answer to Larry's questions is "go ask the rabbi." And the way nobody actually knows the word for a Jewish divorce.
If this is the Book of Job though, it's not God bringing all of this down on Larry so much as the Coen brothers, and I think the movie can best be enjoyed if you view it from their perspective. Some people find the whole thing just depressing, and I imagine if you're really empathizing with the characters then you might think so. But there's so much absurdity that I couldn't imagine taking the movie at face value. I think a better criticism would be that the whole movie is some dark joke amongst the Coens, watching their characters squirm for their amusement. But hey, at least it's a funny one.
Especially if you're a Coen Brothers fan, A Serious Man impresses by being so entirely different from anything else they've made. It's hard to imagine it came from the same minds as No Country for Old Men. If I had to pick a movie it's most similar to, I'd probably land on Barton Fink, another odd one about internal crisis with an unusual ending (A Serious Man's ending won't confuse you like that of No Country for Old Men, but its bleak punchline may leave you just as unsatisfied). I might also go with The Big Lebowski, a completely dissimilar movie that oddly shares a somewhat similar tone.
There's a lot that's potentially off-putting about A Serious Man. It's very Jewish not just in the amount of Hebrew they throw at you early on, but in the entire style of humor they employ, and if you haven't chanted haftarah, you might feel out of the loop. The comedy is so pitch-black that you may not even realize the Coens are joking. But if you enjoy intelligent movies that pose serious questions, making you think hard about the fact that there's no intention of answering them, you'd be missing out not to see it. And while Sy Ableman may be a serious man, the movie itself is more seriously funny.
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