This film doesn't add up, but don't blame Michael Stuhlbarg.
A Serious Man (2009)
Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
105 minutes
* *
Joel and Ethan Coen have written and directed some of the edgiest and most interesting films of the past twenty-five years, but A Serious Man isn’t one of them. In O Brother, Where Art Thou? the Coens did an update of The Odyssey; in A Serious Man they turn their attention to the Biblical Book of Job.
The film is set in a cookie cutter suburb of Minneapolis in 1967—the sort of place where the Sixties is still mostly the Fifties, but the former is inexorably eroding the complacency of the latter. Larry Gopnik—nicely played by Michael Stuhlbarg—is indeed a serious man, a college physics professor who teaches with his back to his students and fills blackboards floor to ceiling with arcane equations designed to prove that many problems are unsolvable paradoxes. He’s a clueless and goofy Mensch content to commute home each evening to a nondescript ranch house, a bored wife, a daughter who washes her hair more often than Lady Macbeth soaped her hands, and an about-to-be-Bar-Mitzvahed son whose world revolves watching “F Troop” and surreptitiously smoking pot to take the edge off his humdrum existence. Larry doesn’t foresee any of the tribulations about to come his way. When his wife announces she wants a divorce in order to take up with the overbearing Sy Ableman—expertly played by Fred Malamed as a Jewish version of Leo Buscalgia—Larry’s world begins to unravel. Soon he finds himself being bribed by a Korean student and blackmailed by his father. His tenure decision is in jeopardy; his car is wrecked; his brother is dogged by local police; he’s being hounded by a record company for bills racked up by his no-account son; and he faces staggering lawyer fees. He even ends up paying for the funeral of his wife’s paramour. Larry is literally hemmed in, with a seductress on one side of his home and a redneck anti-Semite on the other. When Larry seeks help and answers from various rabbis, all he receives are strings of platitudes steeped in Stoicism and gibberish.
Poor Larry! The wailing vocals of Grace Slick singing “Somebody to Love” opens the film and reappears throughout. The song’s opening lines—When the truth is found to be lies/And all the joy within you dies—is pretty much the arc of this film’s narrative. These ideas probably played much better on the story boards than they appear on screen. There are several glaring problems with the film. First, it treads turf covered by numerous recent films. The character of a meek man to whom bad shit happens is also the central trope of Lost in Translation (2003), Broken Flowers (2005), and The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). The fact that Joel Coen directed the last of these makes one wonder why he’d go there again.
105 minutes
* *
Joel and Ethan Coen have written and directed some of the edgiest and most interesting films of the past twenty-five years, but A Serious Man isn’t one of them. In O Brother, Where Art Thou? the Coens did an update of The Odyssey; in A Serious Man they turn their attention to the Biblical Book of Job.
The film is set in a cookie cutter suburb of Minneapolis in 1967—the sort of place where the Sixties is still mostly the Fifties, but the former is inexorably eroding the complacency of the latter. Larry Gopnik—nicely played by Michael Stuhlbarg—is indeed a serious man, a college physics professor who teaches with his back to his students and fills blackboards floor to ceiling with arcane equations designed to prove that many problems are unsolvable paradoxes. He’s a clueless and goofy Mensch content to commute home each evening to a nondescript ranch house, a bored wife, a daughter who washes her hair more often than Lady Macbeth soaped her hands, and an about-to-be-Bar-Mitzvahed son whose world revolves watching “F Troop” and surreptitiously smoking pot to take the edge off his humdrum existence. Larry doesn’t foresee any of the tribulations about to come his way. When his wife announces she wants a divorce in order to take up with the overbearing Sy Ableman—expertly played by Fred Malamed as a Jewish version of Leo Buscalgia—Larry’s world begins to unravel. Soon he finds himself being bribed by a Korean student and blackmailed by his father. His tenure decision is in jeopardy; his car is wrecked; his brother is dogged by local police; he’s being hounded by a record company for bills racked up by his no-account son; and he faces staggering lawyer fees. He even ends up paying for the funeral of his wife’s paramour. Larry is literally hemmed in, with a seductress on one side of his home and a redneck anti-Semite on the other. When Larry seeks help and answers from various rabbis, all he receives are strings of platitudes steeped in Stoicism and gibberish.
Poor Larry! The wailing vocals of Grace Slick singing “Somebody to Love” opens the film and reappears throughout. The song’s opening lines—When the truth is found to be lies/And all the joy within you dies—is pretty much the arc of this film’s narrative. These ideas probably played much better on the story boards than they appear on screen. There are several glaring problems with the film. First, it treads turf covered by numerous recent films. The character of a meek man to whom bad shit happens is also the central trope of Lost in Translation (2003), Broken Flowers (2005), and The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). The fact that Joel Coen directed the last of these makes one wonder why he’d go there again.
A more serious problem is that it’s hard to make an interesting film about passive people. Stuhlbarg deftly avoids the temptation to be histrionic and does a fine job with what he’s given, but the script is simply too thin to draw us in. After we see Larry’s non-reaction to his first few trials the rest of the film is like repeatedly watching crash-test dummies slammed into a wall (which also happens to Larry). There’s none of the witty repartee that made O Brother such a delight, nor are there wacky capers, thrilling pursuits, or dramatic turnabouts. This is a film about a man whose frustration deepens by the moment, an experience that rubs off on viewers.
Finally, it’s standard to review ethnic films with lines such as “You don’t need to be Jewish to appreciate ….” In this case, you probably do have to be Jewish to pick up all the in-jokes, untranslated Yiddish words, and cultural references. The Coens misfire by turning the Book of Job into a Jewish tour de farce—it robs the story of its universal appeal.
Fine acting, quirky situations, and clever cinematography are simply not enough to rescue what is, at its core, a very dull film. I’m grateful for one thing: the soundtrack sent me back to an old Jefferson Airplane record for the first time in years. You might want to go straight to the Airplane and save yourself 105 trying minutes.--LV
Finally, it’s standard to review ethnic films with lines such as “You don’t need to be Jewish to appreciate ….” In this case, you probably do have to be Jewish to pick up all the in-jokes, untranslated Yiddish words, and cultural references. The Coens misfire by turning the Book of Job into a Jewish tour de farce—it robs the story of its universal appeal.
Fine acting, quirky situations, and clever cinematography are simply not enough to rescue what is, at its core, a very dull film. I’m grateful for one thing: the soundtrack sent me back to an old Jefferson Airplane record for the first time in years. You might want to go straight to the Airplane and save yourself 105 trying minutes.--LV
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1 comment:
I didn't see it but I enjoyed reading your review -- nice crash dummies analogy.
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