REVIEW A Serious Man

By Philip Martin

LITTLE ROCK — A Serious Man90Cast: Michael Stuhlbarg, Sari Lennick, Fred Melamed, AaronWolff, Amy Landecker, Jessica Mc-Manus, Richard Kind, Adam Arkin Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen Rating: R, for language, drug use and brief nudity Running time: 100 minutes

In Western popular culture suburbs are so often cast as shrink-wrap for the soul that the idea has become a cliche - all a filmmaker needs to do to convey a sense of banal horror is run a camera down a tidy bourgeois lane lined by wellkept tract houses. Our universe favors entropy, and all our efforts to impose order and decency on the chaos will eventually collapse. Weeds will grow in the ruins of cities, evil will leach through the bones of the honorably inhumed.

Part of being an adult is recognizing our ultimate futility, and deciding to carry on anyway, for the sake of the innocentand to minimize sufferings. Maybe we place a bet on something greater than ourselves, in a life beyond the pain of living; maybe we simply admit to ourselvesthat there are things we cannot know and do our best to be happy. We sublimate our essential emptiness and get with whatever program has been laid out before us: This is what it means to be serious.

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) considers himself a serious man. More than once in the Coen brothers’ deeply black, desperately comic A Serious Man, he so proclaims himself. What he means is he has done what he was told to do, he has followed all the rules and he expects to receive whatever benefits accrue: the suburban house, the 2.5 children, the dutiful (if not particularly loving) wife and - after years of filling up university chalkboards with the pure reason of math-based physics - tenure. It doesn’t seem too much to ask.

But bad things are beginning to happen to Larry. His hapless though possibly brilliant brother Arthur (a fearless Richard Kind) has moved into his home, and now spends most of his time in the family bathroom draining a sebaceous cyst. His son Danny (Aaron Wolff) is studying the Torah in anticipation of his bar mitzvah, but he seems more consumed with F Troop, marijuana and the Jefferson Airplane - and in evading the hulking bully to whom he owes $20. (For the pot?) His daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) is a self-centered sneak thief who spends every available moment (when Arthur doesn’t have the bathroom tied up) washing her hair.

Larry seems as oblivious to the problems of his children as they are heedless of his dreams for them. And now his wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), informs him that their marriage is irreparably broken, and that she wants (needs) a ritual divorce so that she can marry her soul mate, an unctuous, purring man mountain named Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), who assures Larry that everything will be all right.

And, just as the university committee begins to consider granting Larry tenure, a South Korean student with poor math skills tries to bribe Larry to change his grade and prevent him from losing his scholarship. And the chairman of his department drops by to apprise Larry that someone is sending anonymous letters to the school complaining of Larry’s “turpitude.” (Because they’re anonymous, they won’t be given any weight, he tells Larry. He just wanted him to know.)

Marooned in a local low-rent motel with his grotesque brother, Larry hits bottom and seeks the advice of three rabbis and adivorce attorney (a pleasantly fatted Adam Arkin). The most callow of the rabbis suggests Larry view his recent bad luck streak as a chance to view the world afresh; the more senior one tells him a perplexing story about God’s mysterious ways, and the ancient senior rabbi refuses to see him on the grounds that he’s too busy thinking.

But just as soon as we come to understand Larry as a Job figure, his world begins to brighten. Which, if you’re familiar with the Coen brothers, is a very bad sign indeed.

While the Coens have always dealt in stereotypes (and thus courted the opprobrium of good people), A Serious Man is so grounded in a specific reality - a sparsely treed suburb of Minneapolis in 1967 - that it has the feel of a memoir, a memory piece populated by filtered versions of actual people and places. These are the Coens’ people, and if they treat themroughly we might also assume they love them, if grudgingly. People will complain - and have complained - about the portrayals of the Jewish characters, but the film feels emotionally authentic and genuinely interested in the philosophical questions it raises.

At the very least it is a work of remarkable discipline, as the Coens and their regular collaborators, including cinematographer Roger Deakins, composer Carter Burwell, and production designer Jess Gonchor, have created a pointillistic world from particular Jewish references which, while they are likely to have a more profound resonance with insiders, cue us into the depth of their moral engagement and intelligence. It is possible to find the Coens guilty of giving offense while admiring the quality of their efforts. They are trying very hard to be good.

MovieStyle, Pages 33 on 10/30/2009

Make a comment on this story.