The Coen Brothers | 1hr 45min
Tormented by a lack of answers to his perpetual misfortune, Jewish physics professor Larry Gopnik meets with three rabbis in A Serious Man. The first is a young optimist fresh out of college, naively suggesting that Larry simply needs to shift his disposition. “The parking lot here. Not much to see,” he ponders, staring out his office window. “But if you imagine yourself a visitor, somebody who isn’t familiar with these autos and such. Somebody still with a capacity for wonder. Someone with a fresh… perspective.” Larry’s frustration with his frivolous metaphor is plain to see.
The second rabbi chooses to share an anecdote from a member of his synagogue – a dentist bewildered by the Hebrew scripture he finds engraved on the teeth of a non-Jewish patient. Driven to uncover what this could mean and how it got there, the dentist pursued the mystery to all ends, and eventually approached the rabbi to hear his insight. “So what did you tell him?” Larry eagerly asks, only to be met with curt indifference.
“Is it relevant?”
Still searching for a shred of guidance, Larry does not even make it all the way into the office of the final and most senior rabbi. He is busy, the secretary tells him, despite our view of the clearly unoccupied old man sitting at his desk.
The fact that this seems like the run-up to a joke with no punchline is absolutely intentional on the Coen Brothers’ behalf, typifying their darkly ironic sense of humour. In these three rabbis, we find three answers that religion commonly gives to tough philosophical questions, including one total non-response. There is no grand revelation that inspires or consoles us. Instead, we find a mirror to the long, elaborate setup that is Larry’s life, prompting us to similarly ask – what is all this leading to? Is there a guiding hand behind the breakdown of his marriage to Judith, his brother’s legal woes, and his son’s troubles at Hebrew school? And if so, why must this suffering be inflicted on a man who by most accounts is a relatively good person?
That Larry makes a career out of searching for meaning through numbers certainly complements this existential character study too, and is perfectly distilled in his lecture on the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, suggesting that two conflicting states of being may simultaneously exist until they are observed. He is a man of both science and faith, and as far as he is aware, God both exists and does not. The mise-en-scène surrounds him with books in his attorney’s office and shrinks him beneath a colossal blackboard of equations, but all the information in the world cannot point to a simple yes or no answer.
The film as a whole is no great cinematographic triumph from Roger Deakins, yet in moments like these he draws a clean minimalism through Larry’s cookie-cutter neighbourhood and local synagogue, then every so often tips it off balance with canted angles, hazy drug trips, and surreal nightmares that bleed into reality. The discomfort is pervasive, eroding our trust in the security of Larry’s day-to-day existence, and prompting us to adopt his tentative doubt. Perhaps it would be comforting to believe in God, but then why is he being punished so cruelly? If there really is no sense to it all, how can he reckon with the random whims of pure chaos?
Although Larry’s journey from one tribulation to the next is not difficult to follow, the formal intricacies and allusions to the Book of Job place A Serious Man among the Coen Brothers’ most profoundly enigmatic works. We are condemned to the same ungratifying search for answers as our protagonist, so the decision to set the first scene of his story far outside his perspective is a bold one indeed. This prologue grounds the film in 19th century Jewish folklore, recounting the tale of a married couple faced with a terrifying uncertainty. Is the man they have invited into their house truly human, or rather a dybbuk – that is, an evil spirit in disguise? After the wife stabs the visitor, he wanders outside into the snow, leaving this question frighteningly ambiguous. If these are Larry’s ancestors and the old man was indeed a dybbuk, then perhaps this is the source of the curse which would ruin his life over a century later. If the visitor was a living being, maybe our protagonist is just a very unlucky man.
From there, the Coen Brothers weave a tapestry of subplots through A Serious Man that mirror Larry’s identity in others. In his wife’s lover, Sy, he finds the well-respected “serious man” he wishes he could be – albeit one who coincidentally perishes in a road accident at the exact moment Larry crashes his own car. In his brother Arthur, he sees an even more broken version of himself, to whom he offers the same impractical guidance that others try to give him. As for his son Danny who struggles to fit in at school, there the Coen Brothers model a smaller scale version of his own ethical dilemmas. Is Larry justified in sleeping with his neighbour and experimenting with marijuana, now that he has split from his wife? What about accepting a monetary bribe from another student in exchange for a passing grade? If he is already being unjustly chastened by God, surely crossing these moral boundaries won’t make difference – and if God doesn’t exist, then who really cares?
It is along this line of thinking though that Larry lets his sense of accountability gradually wear away in A Serious Man, spurred on by a helpless passivity. Danny’s subscription to the Columbia Record Club under his father’s name isn’t exactly fair, yet Larry is still responsible for making the overdue payments anyway. He reasons that he shouldn’t be punished for not doing anything, but since new vinyls are automatically mailed without customer intervention, it is precisely his inaction that has landed him in this situation.
The more we begin to recognise this dysfunctional trait in Larry, the more we see how his inclination to dwell in self-pity is at least partly responsible for many of his other problems too. He did not need to move out of his family home without standing his ground, and neither did he need to give into the pressure of paying for Sy’s funeral. Michael Stuhlbarg’s sheepish demeanour embodies every bit of this unassertive meekness, barely pushing his soft, reedy voice past a moderate speaking volume even when he shouts. Instead, he focuses all his anger at a God whose old-fashioned retribution seems ill-fitting to his upstanding lifestyle, and who conveniently isn’t present to verbally retaliate.
If there is a divine message to be found anywhere in A Serious Man, then it is ironic that it should come from the reclusive senior rabbi who previously declined a meeting with Larry. Instead, it is Danny who is chosen to receive his cryptic wisdom, delivered in the form of song lyrics.
“When the truth is found to be lies,
And all the hope within you dies… then what?”
Even those who aren’t familiar with ‘Somebody to Love’ by Jefferson Airplane would recognise these words from the film’s recurring musical motif. Its urgent rhythms accompany Larry’s philosophical journey with a raw, driving intensity, yet still he overlooks his life’s missing purpose hidden plainly in the song’s very title. As if to answer the question he has posed Danny, the rabbi ends their brief meeting with a simple yet valuable instruction.
“Be a good boy.”
Living with such uncertainty, is this moral imperative not the best we can do? If every one of Larry’s trials has been a test of his integrity, then has he succeeded? The Coen Brothers rarely give us the endings we expect to their films, yet with the mighty coincidence that turns up at Larry’s doorstep the moment he takes his first truly sinful action, they once again prove why they are among their generation’s best screenwriters. Drowning in legal fees, the bribe his student left on his desk begins to look very attractive, and no more than a second after he decides to give into temptation does the phone ring with dire news on the other end.
The tornado which simultaneously approaches Danny’s school only compounds our suspicion that Larry is being punished for a relatively minor transgression, once again suggesting a visitation of the father’s sins upon his children, and referencing the Book of Job where God appeared to his tormented follower as a whirlwind. The Coen Brothers’ parallel editing evocatively binds both the fatal disease and natural disaster together as a chilling, fateful condemnation, yet still we must question – isn’t this totally disproportionate to the sin that was committed? Must Larry now endure the ultimate catastrophe for cutting a moral corner that anyone under similar duress would also disregard?
Or is this merely a convenient explanation we would like to apply to the chaotic winds of chance? After all, those with who listen closely may pick up on the phone’s muffled ring first sounding immediately before Larry changes his student’s grade, even though the sharp interruption of the second ring is the one we consciously notice. It seems a minor difference, but if we are considering cause and effect in broad ontological terms, then it bears incredible weight on how we view the universe. Maybe Larry was always going to meet this unremarkable end, and maybe living a moral life won’t save any of us from what’s coming. Without any firm assurances though, the Coen Brothers simply leave us to dwell in A Serious Man’s eerie, senseless ambiguity. When all is said and done, perhaps being a “good boy” is the best we can do with what little we’ve got.
A Serious Man currently available to rent or buy on Apple TV, YouTube, Amazon Video.
