Sunday, September 13, 2009
Film TIFF Review: A Serious Man
Posted by J.R. Jones on 09.13.09 at 06:58 AM
When I covered the 2008 Toronto film festival, my first screening was a Friday 9 AM showing of Joel and Ethan Coen's Burn After Reading. This year my first screening was a Friday 9 AM showing of Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man. It took place in the same theater, and I think I may actually have been sitting in the same seat. And they call me unadventurous!
A Serious Man inhabits that happy middle ground where the Coen brothers' most endearing movies reside: it's neither a flat-out misanthropic farce (Burn After Reading, The Ladykillers) nor a genre rehash (The Man Who Wasn't There, Blood Simple), but a comic parable that treats its characters with some measure of understanding and charts its own path without looking over its shoulder to earlier movies. Like Fargo and The Big Lebowski, it has all the earmarks of a personal statement, one of those movies that their biographer will use to connect the dots after they're gone.
Larry Gopnik, played by noted stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg, is a put-upon physics professor teaching at a small-town college in the Coens' native Minnesota. The Summer of Love is just beginning, and although psychedelia hasn't filtered out to the hinterlands yet, the movie's funniest motif is its intermingling of Judaic lore and the Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow LP. This reaches a hilarious climax when Larry's rebellious teenage son, approaching his bar mitzvah, is ushered into the dark, cavernous office of the temple's most revered rabbi. Sitting before the wizened old man, the boy waits in silence for him to dispense his words of wisdom. Finally the pearls drop from his lips: "When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies..."
The story often reminded me of The Man Who Wasn't There—like the Billy Bob Thornton character in that movie, Larry Gopnik is a man beset by problems that push him toward an existential dilemma. His wife wants to leave him for a beefy, moistly empathetic neighbor (Fred Melamed), his dysfunctional brother (Richard Kind) has moved into the house, and an stubbornly ambitious South Korean student in search of a passing grade complicates the professor's upcoming tenure vote by slipping him an envelope stuffed with cash. But in contrast to the earlier movie's tired noir moves, A Serious Man is earnestly engaged in the question of what it takes to be a good man, a serious man. Though I'm guessing its snarky directors would be the last to admit this.
Comments (6)
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can anyone explain why this was set in 1967, however the columbia record company was sending the family records that were not released until 1970 cosmos factoty and santanas abraxas?
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A Serious Man is a comedy of sorts. We laugh if only not to cry. Larry is an innocent man, trapped in a world he doesn’t understand, tormented by forces out of his control. He seeks spiritual advice from three rabbis, one more useless than the last. In fact, the only person who seems reasonable and honest is Larry’s divorce attorney.
Read my full review at http://cfilmc.com/a-serious-man/
I liked this movie. Does anyone have any thoughts about the connection of the Dybuuk in the opening prolog to the rest of the film? I have some thoughts, but wanted the directors to make that clearer.
Worldbeat - I was left pondering the dybuuk myth too - and came to this page in part looking for others thoughts.
Here's my own: the outcome of the episode is left in doubt. Did the wife prove her point, or did she murder an innocent man? We're just not told the answer. What we DO know is that she was right about the curse: husband and wife and their descendents are doomed to be slaughtered in the holocaust (unless they are among the lucky few who emigrate).
So...perhaps they are doomed because they murdered an innocent man. Or...the visitor was a dybuuk, and they die anyway. Or...it doesn't make any diference.
These questions hang over the action in the main movie for me. Did you notice the skull and crossbones visible on later shots of the "Jolly Roger" motel the protagonist moves into. Among other things, it was a SS symbol. The kids insanely pushed into the parking lot by their senile teacher gape at the oncoming tornado...
Call me holocaust obsessed - i don't think it's an accident. And the holocaust is just a larger instance of the seemingly mindless suffering that jews - and all humans - have been subject to over the millenia.
Why? It's the uncertainty of the answer that serves as the movies backdrop.
alex lerman
Alex Lerman: I found this movie extremely painful to watch, as I can identify closely with the Larry Gropnik character. In my view, the theme of the entire movie (including the Yiddish prologue) was summed up by the Korean student's father: When it comes to understanding why bad tings happen, we must "Accept the mystery".
