Film Review: A Serious Man (Spoilers)

If you’re a Coen Brothers fan you’ll love this. ‘A Serious Man’ is a terribly (and typically) ideosynchratic work by Joel & Ethan, which equally typically fascinates and infuriates in equal measure. The plot is simple enough – Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a theoretical physics professor in a closely knit Jewish community in the American midwest in the 1960s, who suddenly finds his entire world falling apart through no fault of his own. His wife is leaving him, his kids are fighting, he’s being bribed by a Korean student and his son’s on drugs – he saw none of this coming and has no idea what to do. What follows is a gently humorous (yet drawn out) look at Jewish angst in 1960s America – very little actually happens other than a great deal of worrying, which seems largely to be the point. There are multiple subtexts about religion, community and the meaning of life, which the Coens use Stuhlbarg as their point man to run through.

The brothers clearly have something to say about the meaning of life – as soon as Stuhlbarg succeeds in reconciling with his wife (only after her lover dies in a car crash  just at the same moment Stuhlbarg has a separate crash), he finds he’s terminally ill. Shortly after his son (Aaron Wolff – one to watch) completes his Bar Mitzvah and starts to mature, it’s implied that he’s killed by a tornado. So is ‘A Serious Man’ ultimately a treatise on the cyclical nature of life, or on how you should enjoy life while you have it, warts and all? The Coens don’t give you easy answers, but they do deliver some exquisite performances, excitingly from a cast of unknowns (apart from Richard Kind from ‘Spin City’). Stuhlbarg in particular gives an outstanding, empathetic performance as Gopnik, questioning why his life is going the way it is, and not even able to get a straight answer from his Rabbi (George Wyner, who nearly steals the show). No word from God and only crazy anecdotes from His representative on earth – welcome to sixties America, where even cultural norms are fraying under the surface.

It’s not the Coens’  best work – something this philosophical really does get on your nerves at times, particularly when, following the engagingly funny first act, most of the second is tied up in inaccessible psychotwaddle. But act two is followed by a highly amusing third segment, whose highlight is Wolff’s Bar Mitzvah, which we see through his drug addled haze. But outright laughs like that are few and far between – it’s a very finely tuned black comedy, which I found far more enjoyable than ‘No Country for Old Men’. I prefer film makers like David Lynch or the Coens messing with my mind rather than just being strange for its own sake, but as funny as this is, and as intellectual as it tries to be, this rare venture into non-crime territory doesn’t quite pack the weight of their greatest works.

8/10

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