A Serious Man – A Review

When I think of the Coen brothers, I think of their movie Miller’s Crossing. More specifically, I think of the scene at the end of Miller’s Crossing, when John Turturro begs Gabriel Byrne to “Look in your heart!” and Bryne replies, “What heart?” before shooting him. That, to me, is quintessential Coen: witty, achingly clever, and heartless. If there’s a line where unsentimental becomes schadenfreude, every Coen brothers movie ignores the delineation. Their new effort – A Serious Man – is a comedy of torture. A nebbish physics professor asks the meaning of his existence, and the movie answers him the way Gabriel Byrne answered John Turturro.

After a prologue where a well-meaning Jew invites disaster into his house, we meet Larry Gopnik; a well-meaning Jew who only seeks tenure. Larry is a good, God-fearing man with some serious problems. First, his wife wants a divorce. Second, he’s being blackmailed. Third, he feels forsaken by God. Larry also has a no-good, gambling addict brother and two bratty kids to worry about, but it’s the “forsaken by God”-thing which rankles him the most. In search of answers, Larry turns to three rabbis. But they offer him thin advice. So it seems it’s up to Larry to deal with his problems; if he has real problems; if all problems aren’t a screen from death.

Michael Stuhlbarg, who plays Larry, has the default expression of a man in trouble (the look you get when you’re on a rope bridge and you hear a “snap”). Despite this, he’s a likeable person. Stuhlbarg never seems stupid or gullible as various shitheels exploit him, which is why he maintains sympathy even when he stubbornly refuses to get mad. His misfortune is to be in a Coen brothers’ movie. Anywhere else he’d be shown mercy. But the Coens – like Flannery O’Connor – aren’t big on giving nice people their reward. They’d rather show us how cruel, how arbitrary life is. Stuhlberg’s eyebrows have more chance of pardoning him than the script.

The three rabbis Larry encounters are, in order: naïve, indifferent and inscrutable. The first tells him his problems are all about perspective. “Look at the parking lot!” he tells Larry. It certainly seems to make the first rabbi happy. The second rabbi tells Larry a long involved story about a Jewish dentist and a goy’s teeth. In the story, the dentist finds the words “Help me! Save me!” inscribed where only a dentist could ever read them. It could be a message from God; the revelation of a profound truth. But the second rabbi assures Larry that the moral of the story is to ignore profundity. The last rabbi, Larry only sees through a crack in the door to the rabbi’s office. This man offers no advice. He’s only a presence. For Larry, this last encounter is perhaps the truest expression of his religious faith.

Keep track of Larry’s son in this movie. I’m convinced he’s Larry mark 2. We first meet him listening to Grace Slick in his yeshiva class, then what’s dearest to him in the whole world (his transistor radio) is taken from him, then he’s bullied relentlessly, then a tornado touches down about twelve feet from where he’s stood. As played by Aaron Wolff, he’s a slack-jawed weenie with a fondness for pot (much like his dad). He’s also deeply concerned with Jewish tradition even though he doesn’t understand a word of it. Stoned out his gourd on the day of his bar mitzvah, he’s sees absurdity all around him, but any meaning to the ceremony is lost.

Be happy you have problems, is the moral of Larry’s story. If you want an explanation for the last shot of A Serious Man (and you will), here it is: death ends all problems. There’s a lot from the Book of Job in this movie. Job (as you’ll recall) is the one where a pious man is tested by God. After all his travails, when Job’s wife tells him to “curse God and die”, Job says to his wife, “Shall we receive good at the hand of God and shall we not receive evil?” For a good Jew, Larry is somewhat remiss in forgetting that verse. The reason the Coens are inspired by it is obvious: Job is Larry. He’s every man in every Coen brothers movie. The question is: does God laugh at Job?

2012 – A Review

When a battleship squishes the President of the United States, you know you’re watching a Roland Emmerich movie. The same man who introduced the world to Will Smith by having Big Willie knock-out an extra-terrestrial; the same man who had Jake Gyllenhaal fend off the next ice age with a campfire; the same man who gave you Ferris Bueller versus Godzilla!!!…brings you this: the end of the world as we know it (unless you’re a hard-up character actor, or a cute kid, or a giraffe, or a Tibetan monk). For shear, insane, eyeball-trampling spectacle, Emmerich deserves a medal. For story-telling (and everything else), he deserves a punch.

Bright Star – A Review

Jane Campion says she made a movie about John Keats because she “was terrified of poetry”. A tricky poem was like a spider in a high corner of her brain; making meaning hard to reach; staining her enjoyment. But Keats proved a good teacher. As he says in the movie: “A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.” Bright Star is about a love of verse.

An Education – A Review

You know you’ve learnt something when you’re changed by what you’ve learnt. If you’re still you, plus a memorized inventory: no dice. That’s why most of most what we learn in school is only exam fodder. There’s a big difference between knowledge that helps you get on in life and knowledge that helps you live. The new British movie, An Education, is about a valuable lesson taught to a 16-year-old by her first whopping great mistake. She is Oxford-bound, a straight-A student, so she could easily have stuck to her books and missed her opportunity. Thankfully, she studies her mistake – appreciates it – and allows experience to enhance her mind.