The Wake

A Serious Man is a dark comedic tragedy that borders on a parable of a dismantled existence. The story is set in 1967 suburban Minnesota and centered on a beyond–unfortunate—possibly curse —middle–aged Jewish father, Larry Gopnik. As a professor of physics at a small university, Larry clings to the routine of his life and the freestanding equations that supposedly describe his surrounding world. He is so far detached from this world that he lingers before he falls—as a cartoon character might after unknowingly speeding off a cliff.

Like most of the Coen brothers’ characters, Larry is a victim of his environment. As an academic living in a middle-class Jewish neighborhood, Larry finds himself lost and beleaguered as his wife leaves him. The man of interest is an elder colleague of Larry’s who has ambition and importance in the community, Sy Ableman (played by a deceptively calm and gregarious Fred Melamed). Additionally, Larry’s disillusioned brother (Richard Kind)­—who is working on a probability map to predict the events of the universe—is falling apart both physically and mentally while living on the couch. Larry’s daughter is preoccupied with stealing money for a planned nose job and his son is smoking weed when he should be preparing for his Bar Mitzvah. At his job, Larry receives a bribe from a Korean student who wants a passing grade while the board responsible for determining his tenure is receiving anonymous letters urging them to not grant him the position. Larry is for the meantime relatively passive in situations; he is undertaking an effort in becoming a righteous—and simple —man.

It’s clear the Coen brothers have taken much pleasure in finding ways to torture their protagonist. They treat all of Larry’s problems with the same amount of humor and importance—from the petty issues concerning his neighbor mowing over the property line to the more serious dissolution of his marriage. A face readily recognized and lauded in the New York theatre scene, Michael Stuhlbarg, plays Larry in the film. Stuhlbarg, like most of the cast of A Serious Man, remains relatively unknown to moviegoers—a reportedly conscious effort by the Coens.

The film is pieced together like an unsympathetic homage to middle-class Midwestern Jewish life. While it may be one of the first explorations of this life in film, the story still feels dry. The struggle Larry goes through is the struggle of many others, but the universality of the story doesn’t hold strong. Perhaps this is because of the Coen brothers’ blatant disregard for their character’s well being.

Larry confronts the disintegration of his life­—after some prompting from both his peers and a divorce attorney who acts as one of Larry’s/Job comforters—by consulting a rabbi. The senior rabbi is, of course, occupied. Larry is forced to resort to consulting two lower-ranking rabbis. The consultation of multiple rabbis is a play on the importance of questioning in the Jewish faith. But just as the passive and increasingly neurotic professor is left with no answers after either consultation, the repetition adds little of anything other than comedic effect for the audience.

Because the film simultaneously occupies and exhibits the milieu of Jewish values, Midwestern lifestyle and ’60s culture, the humor of the film is diffused and then concentrated across the domains of culture, geography, and generation. This means that while the film appeals to a wide audience —perhaps through the absurdity of the situations themselves—references to Ron Meshbesher will be lost on many moviegoers.

The Coens have proved themselves as experts at analyzing sub-subcultures. Just as Fargo encompasses its own stereotypical Minnesotan world or Barton Fink and its exploration of entertainment writing in 1940s Hollywood, A Serious Man is another self-contained effort. This time the Coen brothers turn to a more familiar setting and have succeeded in pointing to all the nuances while crafting a story that is, in a way, all-encompassing.

The world of Larry Gopnik has been created with perhaps more intimacy than any of their other films. Having been raised in a Jewish community in St. Louis Park by parents both from academia, the film is closest to home for Joel and Ethan. Yet there is no restraint in the situations the Coens pushed their protagonist through. In comparison to their other films it lacks the blood that has splattered over every other character, yet the situation—the meaninglessness and dryness that the story is presented in—could not be harsher.

Cinematographer Roger Deakins returns from a brief Coen brothers hiatus to wonderfully capture the quintessence of the late ’60s suburban Jewish neighborhood. The freshly constructed suburban homes seem to already occupy their own faded glory in a treeless and otherwise empty neighborhood captured in Bloomington, Minnesota. The shots are crisp like fall weather—we can already taste the death that occupies the scenes. Less of the sweeping, wide-angled shots that characterized many of the Coen brothers’ previous films impart the feeling of being enclosed in a suburb with little place to turn to or vent. Deakins utilizes hard-focuses and close-ups to reinforce the shallow intimacy viewers take from the storyline.

Despite the visually striking composition of the film, the film fails to create a strong connection between Larry and the audience in order for his struggle for meaning to be worth following. This may be a deliberate superficiality by the Coen brothers. Though, the brothers have little to say of their satisfaction with A Serious Man: “[the film is] Okay.”

The strong points of the film stem from its somewhat enigmatic trailer. The trailer opens with Larry Gopnik’s head repeatedly being slammed into a chalkboard by Sy Ableman. There’s an unsettling, partly unconscious, impression as the sound of a head meeting chalkboard runs through the film’s trailer. It’s a brilliant representation of what is seen in the movie: Here is our protagonist being thrown from one disruptive and sometimes-horrific situation to the next with the same result. While Larry searches for answers, in a quest to be a serious man, he only encounters the same hollow message: the Coen brothers are cold-hearted misanthropes.

Tags: a serious man, coen brothers, ethan coen, joel coen