Out of Frame: A Serious Man

Posted by Tom in DC Life on 10 9th, 2009 | no responses

A Seriously Small Man: Michael Stuhlbarg, as physics professor Larry Gopnik, teaches his students that there is order in the universe. The Coen Brothers aren’t convinced. “I didn’t do anything!” is the repeated mantra of Larry Gopnik, a nebbishy professor of physics at a suburban Minneapolis community college, and the central character of the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man . And if he didn’t do anything, as he keeps suggesting, then why is it that so many awful things keep happening to him? How could Hashem (the Jewish word for God, one of a handful of Yiddish vocabulary words Goys are likely to learn from the movie) be so cruel? His wife is leaving him, he’s broke, his kids are ungrateful brats whose only use for him is to steal money from his wallet and send him up to the roof to adjust the aerial so they can watch F-Troop , he’s a victim of extortion and a plot to sabotage his bid for tenure, and his freeloading mental-case of a brother tends to hog the bathroom to suction fluid from a cyst on the back of his neck. How many trials is one man expected to bear? One need only look back to Larry’s biblical antecedent, Job, to know that the answer is many, many trials. Larry, like Job, tries to be a righteous man, a serious man , if you will, a phrase he picks up when he hears it used to describe successful, valium-voiced Sy Abelman, the man who is stealing away Larry’s wife. He wants the respect of the community that Sy gets, and doesn’t understand what it is he did to be not worthy of it. After all, Larry teaches physics, the elegant and predictable mathematical expression of the way an ordered universe works. Life, he figures, has to work according to the same principles. As he tells a student early on in the film, actions have consequences. The student isn’t ready to accept that theory, and neither are the Coens, who, playing Hashem to Larry’s Job, are about to give their creation a lesson in just how chaotic the universe can be. In terms of putting a protagonist through the wringer, the directors haven’t

been quite this cruel since Barton Fink , a film which shares A Serious Man ’s penchant for extremely black – actually, make that bleak – humor. This film is very much a companion piece to Fink , similar in tone, but drops the earlier film’s surrealist bent in favor of a more realistic setting in the same heavily Jewish Minneapolis suburbs (and during the same late ’60s time frame) that played host to the Coens’ own Bar Mitzvahs. One wonders if one of the brothers was high during his own coming of age ceremony, just as Larry’s son Danny is in the movie’s hilariously trippy Bar Mitzvah scene, having smoked up in the restroom immediately before having to perform his recitations in the Synagogue. Religion has always served as the foundation of Larry’s understanding of the world, much – as the Coens suggest in a yesteryear Yiddish-language prologue – as his people have for generations. It’s only natural, when things start falling apart, that he seeks out the advice of an escalating succession of rabbis, who all have idiosyncratic ways of delivering their advice, but seem to say variations on the same thing: God works in mysterious ways, and best not to question those ways. Which isn’t much more reassuring than a world ruled by chance. But if religion doesn’t really offer a worldview any less chaotic than a godless free-for-all, why do we cling so tightly? This may be the core of what the Coens are trying to get at here, as they subtly illustrate the ways in which we assign significance to coincidence, especially in a final shot that is as clear in its intent as it is confounding in its effect. It creates an abrupt end that feels incomplete, until you realize you’ve been led, laughing all the way, right where the directors want you. It’s a quiet masterpiece from the Coens, not as up front in its brilliance as No Country For Old Men , but no less thought provoking, even if it is, despite the title, rather less serious. A Serious Man opens today at E Street and Bethesda Row .