A Serious Man (Film Review)

Alert--Possible Spoilers. I've endeavored not to reveal crucial info in the following film review but it is heavy on description. You know how much you like to know going into a film. If you want a fully clean slate, read no further--

Joel and Ethan Coen’s strangely intimate new film A Serious Man will not likely garner a wide audience in initial run. In fact, it’s a testament to their clout and unique position as eccentric institution that the film even exists in its current form.

A dark boutique film, somewhere between the bleak suburban Hades of Todd Solondz and the clipped curdled Jewishness of Larry David; the persons in A Serious Man are closed-in-upon and vulnerable, born to a completely random world, fleshy and susceptible, it seems that only the self interested and oblivious can find any respite, As suggested from the outset by a quote from 11th century Rabbi Rashi, "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you."

The main character, Lawrence (Larry to friends), is a university math professor. The kind of regimented and wilting academic who only faces his classroom once the scattered esoteric equation that has his blood boiling is scrawled on the enormous board, inadvertently forbidding his poor students to attempt comprehension. At home he is abject and dependent on routine, specifically the whims and drives of his wife. In the person of Larry’s wife the Coen’s present us less a character than a force of nature (a symbolically appropriate choice whose resonance one must see the film to understand). She lays down imperatives and unreasonable demands that Larry just accepts because that is his habit. She says “dinner’s ready,” he say “be there in a minute.” She says, “I’m leaving you for a sixty-year-old widower and need you to give me absolution and all our assets” he says, “Be there in a minute.”

Almost the entire film consists of Larry’s world collapsing amid scenes of the domestic and mundane. The environment around him remains largely unperturbed as he seems to be losing everything.

The Coens play all this equally for laughs and groans. The grotesque recognition when a new character appears, in unflattering low or high angle close up, to deliver some pitch perfect and often perfectly innocent dig or zinger is cleverly humanizing. As much as we want to distance ourselves from Larry’s absurd family and small irksome problems, he is just decent and the film keeps a strange momentum, which retains our attention, though occasionally by only a thread.

I cannot recommend this film highly enough for people who think they are misanthropes or suppose they have confronted postmodern malaise. This fatalistic tale, covering all of life from birth to death and even the after life, without ever leaving the Minnesota of the Coens’ youth only has peer among Greek drama for sheer weight of occurrence. One wonders, as indeed does Larry himself, whom, what menu of malevolent higher beings, he has offended. The final scene is so grandly stark you’ll wonder what level the Coens are operating on. Does this film actually represent their belief system? And if so is it just the humor of the everyday that keeps them from suicide? Or are they just having us on?