*This is a guest post from writer Lesley Jenike.
“It sounds like you don’t know anything! Why even tell me the story,” math professor Larry Gopnik asks Rabbi #2 on his Job-like quest for spiritual understanding. Why even tell the story, indeed?
Critics’ consternation over A Serious Man as an odd change of pace is intriguing to say the least. Is this the kind of movie an Oscar winner makes? Is this Coen Brothers’ most autobiographical film? Have the mysterious Coens finally revealed themselves by creating, finally, an autobiographical film? And to top it all off, why did they make a movie without a single big-name actor?
It’s true. There’s something defiantly perplexing about the film, something rather intense about its silences, weird compositions, odd humor and cringe-worthy dialogue that’s frankly off-putting. Maybe that’s why I loved it.
The Coens are, in my book, among the most consistently innovative filmmakers working today. And I don’t mean “innovative” in the sense that, as directors, they splice and dice filmic conventions the way Baz Luhrmann or Danny Boyle do, for example. Rather, they’re consummate storytellers, fancy jump cuts be damned, and their stories, no matter how dark, how disconcerting, become somehow universal, funny, and true. What’s ultimately so disconcerting about this movie, however, is its skeptical take on the Judeo-Christian tradition of parable and storytelling as illustration and explanation. The Coen brothers are undermining their own profession here, their own modus operandi, and call into question narrative’s effectiveness in light of a chaotic universe and incomprehensible suffering. It’s a dangerous move but ultimately a rewarding one.
The film is loosely organized around a series of “fables,” dramatized and told second-hand, none of which reveal anything beyond the pointlessness.
The movie opens with a fable from a nineteenth century Jewish shtetl (all dialogue in Yiddish, no less) in which a husband invites what a wife believes to be a dybbuk into the house. The wife, in her ignorance, stabs the man to prove he’s a ghost. The man staggers out, bleeding, into the snow. So begins a cycle of misread signs and empty ritual not even a “serious man” can overcome. It’s no accident, Bitch Flicks readers, that trouble begins with a woman. This is probably the Coens’ most specifically Jewish movie and the Jewish narrative’s patriarchal power structure is immediately evident.
Cut to the late sixties. Larry Gopnik’s son is listening to Jefferson Airplane in Hebrew school. Faith seems strikingly empty. Dybbuks still appear but as sublimations. Women still ruin lives but by slowly emasculating their husbands.
Now, I don’t pretend to know the particulars of Jewish culture and the Jewish religion, but I do know that the struggle to maintain faith and tradition in an ever-increasingly secular, often hostile world is a recurring theme in Jewish film and literature, and A Serious Man is no different. Its long shots and odd angles emphasize otherness, strangeness and estrangement, even within the context of the familiar, i.e. Larry Gopnik’s middle class, suburban home. Larry’s “goy” neighbors, for example, radiate, from Larry’s point of view, a weirdness he finds fascinating and potentially dangerous. His son smokes pot and simultaneously studies the Torah for his upcoming bar mitzvah while watching some crappy late Sixties TV show. His daughter is flagrantly disrespectful; his wife tells him she’s leaving him for “a serious man,” a neighbor “tempts” him with her breasts and a joint, and a South Korean student bribes him for a passing grade: a series of events that undermines his sense of moral order and integrity. Larry’s world, in other words, is crumbling, and no illustrative story is going to help this time.
A Serious Man’s lack—lack of answers and its uncompromising lack of real narrative sense—is its brilliance. The Coens manage here to dissemble meaning without resorting to empty, surface-level tricks or rhetorical flourishes. In other words, this is a sophisticated film by a pair of filmmakers who’ve cut the crap and gotten down to the heart of the matter: God is not listening.
Lesley Jenike received her PhD from the University of Cincinnati in 2008. She currently teaches poetry writing, screenwriting, and literature classes at the Columbus College of Art and Design. Her book of poems is Ghost of Fashion (CustomWords, 2009).
I have heard from a German professor that the film’s meaning is entangled around a Jewish joke that you either know or don’t. I haven’t spoken to my professor since I’ve seen it, but I don’t get it, nor do I care to. Sadly, I don’t find the film innovate, either. I wanted to love it, though. ;)–mf
“What’s ultimately so disconcerting about this movie, however, is its skeptical take on the Judeo-Christian tradition of parable and storytelling as illustration and explanation. The Coen brothers are undermining their own profession here, their own modus operandi, and call into question narrative’s effectiveness in light of a chaotic universe and incomprehensible suffering. It’s a dangerous move but ultimately a rewarding one.”
This is a very interesting point, and I think the end of the film-with its allusion to The Book of Job-masterfully hits the nail on the head. I do, however, wonder about the attendant dangers involved in undermining narrative, especially in light of the recent spate of natural disasters. Should our response to these events rehearse Job, Candide, and now the Coen Bros., or do we need to do dig deeper into the rubble to discover those hidden narratives, even if they are ultimately of our own making, with God having nothing to do with them or us?
Nice review! I’m loving this Oscar lead up by Bitch Flicks. Bravo.
I also found it interesting that throughout the film, our main character, much like he protests, doesn’t “do” anything – it is only at the end when he finally takes an action, and one that he doesn’t believe in, that (bad) things start to happen – the phone call from the doctor, the storm…All the other incidents are threats that cause him anxiety that never come to full realization. So yes, god is not listening so what’s the point of it anyways?
Nicely reviewed, Les. I saw this film as a kind of Jewish Fargo, with yet another a hapless Coen brothers protagonist for whom nothing goes right. The difference is that William H. Macy’s character in Fargo is the instigator of his own problems, while Serious Man’s protag is (like Job) simply overwhelmed by circumstances not of his own making. And I don’t see Serious as necessarily godless. The whirlwind at the end IS God, but God as finally unfathomable and amoral– like the one in Job who allows colossal suffering simply to win a wager with Satan. The 3 rabbis don’t really know anything about the Big Questions, because no one does. Job’s 3 visitors are similarly uncharitable and unhelpful. Ultimately, I loved Serious Man for its lurid yet likably human characters. (The “friend” of the protagonist’s wife and the neighbor woman across the street are just splendid.) The use of relative unknowns allows the characters to breathe in a way that might have been more difficult with big names. And I love the early 60s decor.