A Serious Man Review

Those Coen Brothers are a slippery pair. I've deliberately held off writing this review to let their latest film, A Serious Man, sink in a bit. My favourite of their films is Miller's Crossing with Fargo, No Country For Old Men and Raising Arizona all tied for second. Most of their films are good, very good or at the very least have something of merit in them. Indeed The Coen Brothers are uniquely consistent film makers and have been across a prolonged career. There is a particular category of Coen Brothers film that is somewhat enigmatic, Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn't There and now A Serious Man. I liked the film considerably more than Barton Fink or Man Who Wasn't There but it definitely shares a kinship with those two films.

Michael Stuhlbarg plays Larry Gopnik, a physics professor with a wife who wants to divorce him because she has got together with an amazingly pompous friend Sy Ableman, a son Danny who is less interested in school than he is in their television reception and getting stoned, a daughter Sarah who steals money from him to pay for a nose job, an unemployable brother Arthur (Spin City's Richard Kind) who has a cyst that needs to be regularly drained and who has taken up permanent residence on their couch and a student trying to bribe him for a better grade. As Larry's life slowly disintegrates around him, he asks the question, why. He doesn't get many answers. And neither do we.

And maybe that's the point. Bad things happen to good people and there is no order to it, there is no God who has it in for you, even if your Jewish heritage is telling you otherwise. Of course, if your Jewish heritage is correct and there is a God and you are a good person, why would He have it in for you? Larry goes to visit three rabbi for answers, each of whom is useless in their own particular way, and, with everything that's happening to test Larry, the film could be seen as a re-telling of the story of Job. Is the film actually about the so-called "Jewish curse"? The ending could certainly be read in that way. Or perhaps the point is simply to make people debate endlessly as to what exactly the point is. The Coens are pranksters and the fact that they generate this kind of conversation is as enjoyable to them as the story they are telling, which is not to ignore the fact that there is much in the film to debate. What further complicates A Serious Man is the fact that Larry spends its whole running time saying, "I haven't done anything" as if this were a defence against the bad things coming his way. He HASN'T done anything. Apart from consulting the rabbis, he continues to do nothing, even as God/fate/life/an ancient curse (seen in a wonderful prologue) throws more and more crap at him, and even when he does see the rabbis, he is completely unresponsive to their inability to provide the help he needs. The fact that he seeks help from others in the first place, rather than help himself, is telling and in the end one has to assume that his complacency is at least partially if not totally complicit in his downward spiral.

It's this angle that makes the character of Larry such an interesting one, and one of the Coen's best creations. What's great is that, even taking his lack of initiative as his biggest flaw, you don't lose sympathy with him. This is due in no small part to the fantastic performance of Michael Stuhlbarg who manages to retain dignity and humour in the character, even when you the audience (and apparently fate itself) are screaming at him to act, to do something, anything. This is true in a number of scenes, none moreso than the moment where Sy Ableman confronts Larry and tries to placate him with a bottle of wine. This is an incredibly tough line to walk and the Coens do it very, very well. Rarely does Larry succumb to the loss of control he's experiencing and, when he does, it's mainly in his dreams, a fantastic device that allows us into his psyche and to know he's suffering without having to endure the hand-wringing and histrionics of a lesser film. Despite the litany of disasters falling Larry's way, A Serious Man is also a very warm film, possibly their warmest to date. Many people have criticised the Coens for a somewhat misanthropic approach to making films, a criticism I totally disagree with. Amidst the horror of Fargo is the kind hearted cop Marge Gunderson, appalled by the senseless violence all around her. The beating heart of No Country For Old Men is not the opportunistic Llewelyn Moss or psycopathic Anton Chigurh but Tommy Lee Jones' Sherriff Ed Tom Bell. Miller's Crossing comes down to the loyalty Tom Regan (Gabriel Byrne) has for his mentor Leo and the chaos of Raising Arizona is perpetuated by Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter's simple and heartfelt yearning to have a family of their own. You can't have the good without the bad and just because you're not afraid to depict the bad and to make it very bad, doesn't mean you have it in for the possibility of good in people. With A Serious Man, they have taken their "good character" and put him centre stage. The question is why is he made to suffer and the answer is... well, that is entirely up to you.

This is their most low-key film since The Man Who Wasn't There, completely without fuss and refreshingly free of the glut of Hollywood a-listers they crammed into Burn After Reading. Those people troubled by the abrupt ending of No Country For Old Men are going to REALLY dislike this film. I found the ending touching, heartbreaking and, in a strange sort of way, it helped make sense of the story and bring everything together. This is not my favourite Coen Brothers film but I really enjoyed it and I have a sneaking suspicion it's going to grow on me even more. I'll be very interested to go back to it when it's on DVD and I wouldn't be surprised if I give it a higher score.

On that point, the fact that it's getting the same score as 2012 probably destroys any credibility I can ever have as a film critic. Let's just say that different films can be good in different ways. No? Hello? Anyone there? Come back! I haven't done anything!!

7/10