I have a confession to make. I was planning on writing and publishing this review yesterday, shortly after having finished watching this film. But when the movie abruptly ended, I sat there for a while and struggled with the whole experience, not quite sure what I felt about it and what it was even about. This rarely happens, so rather than jump directly into my personal analysis of it, I sat on it for a day and let it stew. I am glad I did because I discovered that, though I was initially a little cold towards it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and as my mind marinated in it, my esteem for it grew.
When A Serious Man came out in 2009, it was well received by critics but didn’t make big waves at the box office. It was a success because it was a relatively inexpensive film to make, but it was not a huge success. Part of that can be attributed to the lack of an A-list cast, something that the Coen brothers had fallen back on in their more recent films, but another part of that is that this is a more cerebral film; it’s a dark comedy but not a laugh-out-loud absurdity the way something like Burn After Reading was. This one requires you to pay attention to what is going on to get what the brothers are trying to say.
It’s also firmly set in a world that many people would likely assume is unrelatable, that of a Jewish family in the 1960s, though watching it, there is a sense that, Jew or Gentile, we are all the same, just the window dressing may differ. We all have the same foibles, the same insecurities, and the same family problems behind closed doors, to one degree or another. We, too, are just one bad week away from seeing everything spiraling out of control and can imagine how we would react to life coming unraveled in such a short span of time. That’s all it would take, too. Just one very bad week.
A Serious Man is a slice-of-life picture. For people who need a strong narrative-driven movie, this will be a difficult one for them to get into. The film proper is set in 1967 in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a professor of physics, has just found out that his wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), wants a get (a formal Jewish divorce) so that she can marry widower Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed).
Larry is up for tenure at the university but has run into a number of problems. He is failing a Korean student, Clive Park, who, after a meeting discussing his options, leaves behind an envelope filled with money. Larry doesn’t discover the money until after Clive has left, but when he confronts him about it, Clive refuses to acknowledge the attempted bribe and will not take the envelope back. Clive’s father shows up later and threatens to sue him for defamation if he insists Clive left a bribe. He also threatens Larry with exposing that he took a bribe if he doesn’t adjust Clive’s grade to a passing one. On top of this, someone has been writing letters to the school board anonymously urging them not to extend tenure.
Larry’s youngest son, Danny (Aaron Wolff), is approaching bar mitzvah age and has gotten into smoking marijuana. When his radio gets confiscated at school, with his owed drug money hidden inside, he finds himself being chased home every day from school as well as having to steal money from his sister to pay the debt. Larry’s brother Arthur (Richard Kind) has been living with the family while spending his free time filling a notebook with a “probability map of the universe”. He also keeps getting into legal scrapes for everything from gambling to sodomy. Meanwhile, Larry is pushed out of his home by Judith, who doesn’t feel like he should be living with her anymore and she refuses to move in with Sy until she can be wedded to him. Everything seems to be spiraling out of control for Larry as he struggles to keep it together in the midst of a seemingly never-ending series of trials.
This is a film that greatly benefits from having a cast of unknowns. Michael Stuhlbarg was primarily a stage actor who, at the time of this film, had made only a small handful of film appearances. This movie would bring him to the attention of other big-name directors like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, and Sam Raimi, and he has had a successful career as a supporting character actor ever since. At the time, though, he was an unknown commodity, and that helps sell his emotional breakdown. Not having the baggage that comes from a known performer helps suspend belief and go with the story.
This film incorporates dream sequences that are not always easily identified as such, especially while we are seeing them. In one such sequence, Larry gets high with a neighbor woman and later ends up in bed with her. In another, he puts his brother on a small boat to Canada with the bribe money, only to have someone shoot Arthur in the throat before he can escape across the border. These moments work to expose Larry’s anxieties and state of mind, and the Coens expertly interweave them into the narrative without overselling it. These moments are punctuated with him waking up abruptly, telling us that what we just witnessed was all just a dream, though an argument can be made that his fling with the neighbor may have actually happened.
Larry is a man facing the existential absurdity of life. He goes to his junior rabbi looking for answers only to find that faith will not provide him with those easy answers to all of his problems. The senior rabbi is always busy, seemingly unwilling to take the time to even meet with him. Another rabbi only gives him a story that amounts to nothing and comes across as pointless, highlighting that things happen and amount to bupkis. All of this seems to come down to life being meaningless and that everything around us is indifferent to our suffering. Larry is the epitome of that, struggling under the crushing weight of his mounting misfortunes. Fate plays a hand in some of the resolutions, but many of the things befalling him remain unresolved when the film comes to an end. This choice, more than any other, may frustrate some viewers, but it is the correct one for this film.
The Coen Brothers are superb writers and filmmakers. They have a style that could almost be a genre of their own. Not every one of their films is award-worthy, but there isn’t a single one of them that isn’t worth seeing and discussing. A Serious Man will not be for everyone. It’s not a plot-driven film but an examination of character, emotions, and existentialism. It’s also highly entertaining in a way that is hard to describe if you haven’t experienced it. It’s an unusual film in a number of ways, including a brief sequence that opens the film that is seemingly disconnected from anything else in the picture. The Coens claim that this was meant to be an homage to the short films that used to open before the main feature, but others have claimed it is related to the themes. I can see it either way but tend to agree with the Coens on it. This is a unique picture that benefitted from the expanded roster of Academy Award nominations that year, and it only had one other nomination in any other category, but is still deserving of that spot amongst the top films of 2009.
Academy Award Nominations:
Best Picture: Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
Best Writing - Original Screenplay: Joel and Ethan Coen
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Release Date: October 2, 2009
Running Time: 106 minutes
Rated R
Starring: Michael Stuhlbarg and Richard Kind
Directed by: Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
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