"A Serious Man"
(2009, Joel Coen, USA)
Average Contributor Rating:

“A Serious Man”, the latest film from the Coen Brothers, tells the story of Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg). Michael is the typical Coen Brothers lead character. To say he’s down on his luck would be a severe understatement. His wife Judith (Sari Lennick) wants a divorce and is looking to re-marry Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), who can’t help but give Larry self-help advice regarding his failed marriage. What’s more, his brother (Richard Kind) is seemingly perennially leaching off his supplies, his neighbour wants to build a boat house on his property, he finds himself constantly pining over his hot-pants wearing neighbour, and his children do nothing but argue. Needless to say, it sucks to be Larry Gopnik.

“A Serious Man” comes to our shores with a huge amount of critical and popular praise. EMPIRE gave it five stars. Sight and Sound – a slightly more reliable source – made it their film of the month. The popular praise is evident from its ridiculously high score of 8.2 on IMDB. And, I’m happy to say, it’s certainly most deserving of all this praise. After the ridiculously successful “No Country for Old Men” and the slightly more mainstream than most Coen efforts “Burn After Reading”, both of which I liked, it seems like the patch of poor or average films from the Coens – and by a patch I mean two, “the Ladykillers” and “Intolerable Cruelty”. It’s nice to see that it’s behind them. It’s almost possible that “A Serious Man” is better than both “No Country for Old Men” and “Burn After Reading”, and the best film since their unmatchable opening series, which included the likes of “Barton Fink”, “Miller’s Crossing”, “Fargo” and “the Big Lebowski”.

For a film so unquestionably concerned with one character, “A Serious Man” takes a look at the grandest theme of all, being the haphazard nature of life. It tackles the nature of fate and chance. The majority of the characters that live in the film’s world are Jews, and the majority of those are stern believers in their faith. Whilst the Coens never quite step on the toes of the believers, they certainly do make a mockery of the religion in question. Visits to the rabbis are accompanied by false prophecies and ridiculous philosophies, and for the most part Gopnik’s own stretches to be a good, Jewish man are met with unfortunate accidents and bad karma. It seems like the director’s modus operandi is to reduce religion – not just Judaism specifically – to the shambles that it is, and to expose life for the haphazard series of events that it actually is, but I don’t think that is the case. The Coens appear to be lauding religion, not condemning it, for its good points, like the way it brings people together, and its ability to keep those in acceptance away from casual nihilism.

But the comments on fate being simply random are still very much present. The Coens are old hands at viewing their characters like a cruel child would view ants through a magnifying glass – most likely with the sun beaming through it – and they continue that time honoured tradition here. Larry joins the likes of Macy’s Jerry from “Fargo”, Bridges’ the Dude in “the Big Lebowski”, and Clooney’s Everett in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” as characters unfortunate enough to have Joel and Ethan Coen as their overlords. Scene by scene, the brothers add more and more misfortune to Larry’s life and weight to his shoulders, with barely any respite. Whether Larry is refusing bribes or taking them, attempting to win his wife back or fantasizing about having sex with a promiscuous neighbour, his luck goes from bad to worse. I guess some people are just unlucky, and in the Coens’ world, some people are most people.

Comedically, this film is superb. It’s certainly a fact that the Coens are funnier when they aren’t trying to be outright funny. We only have to look at “the Ladykillers” and “Intolerable Cruelty” to see two exhibits of the Coens pandering to conventions rather than going their own way. Instead, the Coens are best when they breathe their own brand of genuinely witty humour, rather than attempting to capture somebody else’s. The film’s funniest technique is the constant use of a comedic ellipsis, where we go directly from the set-up of a joke to the aftermath, allowing us as the viewer to visualize the actually funny bits ourselves. Most of the time, that’s funnier anyway, and the Coens realize this. It’s not in your face funny all of the time, or even most of the time, but it’s suitably dry, cynical, and dark in its humour, and – let’s face it – that’s what the brothers are good at anyway.

It’s certainly quite enjoyable to see Joel and Ethan trying their hands at techniques – or rather, tricks and motifs – perfected by other American filmmakers of their own generation. The film certainly incorporates Wes Anderson’s quirky humour, particularly his use of long pauses, which Anderson almost has trademarked. More noticeable and concrete than that is the parallels drawn to Quentin Tarantino. The opening, set in Poland in times gone by, is more than a little Tarantino-esque. Even more-so is the story about a dentist finding Hebrew markings on the teeth of a non-believable, which is very QT in its derailing of the stream of narrative, but fails to answer the questions in the way that Tarantino would almost feel obliged to. And that’s just the point. Lots of questions are asked, and hardly any answers are given, just like in life. The Coens are placing themselves as the Gods of this picture, and the characters within it are the human race, asking questions that the directors have no real intention of giving them. And so, the only real way for the film to end is in a similar way to “Barton Fink”, with no actual answers and only more questions. Life doesn’t offer up neat little conclusions that can be expressed through a story, and so – at least in the opinion of the Coens – why should a film?