A Serious Man: A Never-Ending Story

A Serious Man is the latest from America’s favorite filmmaking duo, the Coen Brothers, (who will be referred to here as CoBro—it’s faster) whose cannon of black comedies and tense dramas have earned them a place in the most casual filmgoers’ vernacular, as well as a Best Picture Oscar for No Country for Old Men. CoBro has explored the fantastical and the absurd in favorites like The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou, a re-imagining of Homer’s Odyssey as a Depression-era chain-gang break. With A Serious Man, CoBro once again re-imagines ancient lore in a twentieth-century setting, this time with the Book of Job placed in 1967 suburban Minnesota. Although the most memorable parts of CoBro movies are the atmosphere they create around a story like the fantastic levity of O Brother or the goofball hyperbolic Midwest of Fargo, the ornaments of the film give way to the ideas in A Serious Man, rather than the other way around.

Larry Gopnik, our Job for all intents and purposes, is a husband, father, and physics professor who can write out tidy equations to explain the complex workings of the universe, but when his marriage, his job, and very integrity are threatened all at once he returns to his Jewish faith to find a divine explanation for all of his sufferings. But when he reaches out to his rabbis for guidance, instead of solace he finds a palimpsest of stories and riddles that only seem to expand life’s mysteries. Gopnik is left to choose between two dissatisfying philosophies: one that negates faith by resolving that life has no meaning, and the other that embraces the very concept of faith, conceding that there are some mysteries we aren’t meant to understand, some divine truths so awesome we as mere humans are incapable of understanding them.

These are deeply perplexing themes to anyone, and CoBro, whose screenplays are tight as drums, (see Fargo: Oscar Win for Best Original Screenplay) wrestle the open-ended anti-plot of Gopnik’s search in a remarkably structured narrative that is perplexing and labyrinthine in its metaphysical implications, weaving stories, fables, Bible verse, myth, dreams, and even the cryptic rendering of the lyrics to Jefferson Airplane’s “Someone to Love” into a cohesive screenplay. This kind of story-in-a-story structure has its roots in the centuries-old One Thousand and One Nights, where each level of story removed is meant to bring the reader closer to God. Given this conceit, one has to deduce that it is us—the audience—who is searching for meaning, and Larry Gopnik is just another rung in the ladder to divinity. It’s a beautiful idea really, but in A Serious Man the implications of endlessly approaching God like some unreachable mathematical limit are frustrating, leading to still more questions, exasperation, and despair.

But despite all the heavy themes, A Serious Man is full of that signature CoBro comedy, crammed with energy and wacky characters, but always controlled to a T. Tim Blake Nelson, who played Delmar in O Brother, claims the CoBros storyboard every shot before they go into production, and they only shoot what is storyboarded. The result is something carefully crafted, but thoroughly un-organic—we are always aware that we are being entertained.

The setting purveys a refreshing glimpse into the Jewish-American culture that is so rarely depicted in earnest onscreen, and is also an insightful (and educational!) segue into the Coen Brother’s own background, the re-creation of which moils somewhere between grossly stereotypical and painfully personal.

The ensemble cast of relative no-names furnished a heightened sense that the characters onscreen are real people in real trouble, bypassing the sport of comparing celebrities to their past roles and letting the best man for the job take the reins. (In this case, the best man is Michael Stuhlbarg of Broadway fame and Antonio Campos’ no-budget indie, Afterschool.)

For a movie that raises a slew of questions and doesn’t answer a single one, A Serious Man is satisfying as a work of cinema that poignantly encompasses the modern predicament of faith. -Christianne Hedtke

Writer/Director: Joel and Ethan Coen