serious man

After the fanfare of No Country for Old Men and the star-studded spy mis-caper Burn After Reading, the Coen brothers have popped out something a bit more off the radar in the form of A Serious Man. People who exclusively enjoyed either or both of their last two films might find themselves a bit befuddled by this deceptively smaller work, but it is unmistakably a Coen brothers story through and through, and one that perhaps raises more questions than answers. This is also a seriously subtle comedy that sheds some overdue light on the Coen brothers' own bizarre sense of humour.

Larry Gopnik (TV bit-part actor Michael Stulhberg) is a Jewish physics professor living in late 60s suburbia. His brother, the mathematically-inclined Arthur (Richard Kind), has been living with Larry's family for the past three years, much to the annoyance of Larry's wife (Sari Lennick). One by one, various pressures begin to mount on Larry... his wife wants a divorce, a Korean student seems to be trying to bribe and blackmail him, he has money problems, etc, etc. Larry tries to seek the advice of his community's rabbi but fails to take away any learnt lessons, and where the film goes from here is probably best left unsaid.

Jews have had a long association with Hollywood and American showbusiness in general, but despite this there are very few films that are specifically about Jewishness. A Serious Man isn't just set within a Jewish community, it also draws on the Old Testament for allegory and deals directly with the idea of Jewish faith. The film actually opens with a small mini-film set in pre-20th century Russia, a fable that ends in a decidely ambiguous fashion. The fact that we don't know for sure what just happened in this mini-film is the key to understanding A Serious Man. What we are being told is tha there are two ways of seeing things, citing the use of fables as an illustration of how things work. The physics/mathematics motif that runs through this film is another illustration of the mechanics of life, and Larry even says, whilst demonstrating a complicated physics problem to his class, "We can't ever really know what's going on". Another example is his use of Schroedinger's Cat, the famous quantum mechanics theorem that demonstrates a paradox. All the way throughout this film we are shown, over and over again, various real life equivalents - EG. Larry recieves a bribe from a student, but he can't prove that it's a bribe and the student won't say. Also, the circumstances around Larry's impending divorce is equally bereft of information. There is always more than one way to interpret things, and the film's re-use of the line "I didn't do anything", with an emphasis on a different word each time, is another clue towards this.

Some people will have trouble enjoying this movie if they aren't attuned with the mode of humour that the Coen brothers often employ. I've always felt that a good portion of their films are a case of them laughing at the audience's expense (albeit in an entertaining way), but the aforementioned theme of deliberate ambiguity goes some way towards addressing this by explaining their philosophy towards the open-ended nature of life. The rabbi's story about a dentist who discovers Hebrew writing on the back of the teeth of one of his patients is a hilarious piece of Coenesque storytelling... you keep waiting for a moral to this story (alongside Larry) but the moral is self-evident from the start, exemplified by the throwaway line "You can't know everything". Alongside this ongoing examination of assumptions and the bad places they can lead us, A Serious Man also explores the karma-like relationship between Jews and God, with Larry's predicament getting inexplicably worse and worse. As far as religious indoctrination goes, it's done in such a way as to just feel like a part of this fictional world that the filmmakers have put on screen. It's not presented as a life lesson for the viewer, it's simply an unseen presence that guides events and refuses to give an account. I've read some reviews that suggest this story to be a modern-ish retelling of the biblical story of Job... I can't really comment as I'm not overly familiar with it, but it sounds probable.

I had a hard time writing this review, trying to get my head around what was really happening in this movie, but don't let that put you off watching it as on the surface it's very much an inspired and great-looking film full of unexpected curveballs. Be warned though, if you've ever found a Coen brothers film to be less than entertaining you probably will find this one to be exceedingly tedious, it's their most insular and personal film in quite some time.

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