Goy Pride

Faith and Fear in ‘A Serious Man’

Lucien WD
Lucien WD
Aug 8, 2017 · 4 min read

The films of Joel and Ethan Coen have always featured sprinkles of divine intervention, but never with quite as strong a hand as in A Serious Man, their 2009 masterpiece about the unfairness of life and the internal politics of the Midwestern Jewish-American community into which the brothers were raised. A Serious Man opens with a startling, gorgeous prologue: an ancient Yiddish folk tale with a relevance to the rest of the feature that is never overtly explained. We then skip to 1967 Minnesota, and meet Larry Gopnik, an aggressively-passive physics professor played by the warm, enigmatic and unmistakable Michael Stuhlbarg.

For Stuhlbarg, A Serious Man is that sought-after thing: a distinct breakthrough project for which they will long be remembered. Larry Gopnik may not exist in the cineaste’s cultural canon at the level of Barton Fink, but Stuhlbarg’s multifaceted performance will hold up in the Coen catalogue. Larry begins the film bored but happy, and rapidly sees the strands of his life unravel in a variety of colourful ways: his wife is leaving him for clawing neighbour Sy Ableman, his brother Arthur is in trouble for gambling, his kids won’t stop yelling about the TV reception and he’s being blackmailed to change a Korean student’s grade.

Larry is smart, but he isn’t equipped to cope with this much chaos, and during the film we watch him shut down. In a sequence of dreams, he fantasises about pitifully unerotic sex with the woman who lives to the Gopniks’ right and the potential Jew-hunting of the white trash father to their left. These dreams are the most transparent presentation of Larry’s unsnarling psyche — other than Stuhlbarg’s casual shifts in expression — while Arthur (Richard Kind) is far more open with his misery: the most heartbreaking scene in the film sees him sobbing on the edge of a drained motel pool: “I just wanted to play cards”. In the voice of Kind (Inside Out’s Bing Bong), this is the saddest thing in the world.

To gain some existential understanding, Larry visits three local rabbis: the first is Howard from The Big Bang Theory; he’s no use, the second tells Larry an extended tale about a dentist who saw messages from God in his patients’ teeth; the third refuses to speak to Larry, but meets Larry’s son Danny (Aaron Wolff) after his pot-fuelled bar mitzvah. Danny’s priority, rather than the learning of his Torah passages, is the return of his walkman and Jefferson Airplane tape. The elderly rabbi surprises him by quoting the track “Somebody To Love” and naming every member of the band. It’s quite something. Airplane’s music is used in A Serious Man sparingly but with superb tact: “Yesterday” and “Comin’ Back To Me” (two of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard) soundtrack Larry’s imagined love affair, and the poster scene of him on the roof, fixing the TV aerial. Trapped beneath a scalding sun, and with the power of telecommunications in his sweaty hands, this is the closest Larry ever gets to God.

A sharp, flawless 106 minutes, the film brings its dual narratives — the struggles (of varying stakes) of Larry and Danny — back around: Danny returns to his classroom with his music, Larry receives a call from his doctor to discuss the X-Ray he was getting when he first met him. “I think we’d be more comfortable in person… I’ve cleared some time” his doctor explains morbidly, as a massive tornado approaches Danny’s school. The Coens cut to black and drop a “Somebody To Love” reprise just at the height of the action: it’s one of the most exhilarating, perfect endings in film history. A Serious Man is my favourite kind of art: it refuses to spoon-feed its ideas and opinions to the audience, leaving interpretation as a matter for one’s patience, imagination and intelligence to determine. It’s also quite pathological; I’ve found myself rewatching it start-to-finish several times in recent months, a genuine rarity with any recent cinema. I suppose, in some way, I relate to almost every character in the film: the frustrated suburbanite, the cynical youth, even the cantankerous old rabbi. A Serious Man is a film about very real people, experiencing misfortunes that appear totally unreal. And it does so with spectacular wit and charm. This is what a cult classic looks like. Scratch that. This is what a classic looks like.

Keeping You Interested.

Lucien WD

Written by

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Luwd Media

Keeping You Interested.

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