With a résumé that includes some of the most screwball (Raising Arizona), dark (Fargo), quirky (The Big Lebowski) and critically acclaimed (all of the above) films of the past twenty years, the Coen brothers are giants in the world of cinema. On October 2, the “two-headed director” released their newest genre-blurring masterpiece, A Serious Man.
The film follows Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a Jewish physics professor living in an almost satirically nondescript Midwestern town. As his relationships with his brilliantly deranged, freeloading brother (Richard Kind), his manipulative wife (Sari Lennick), and his emotionally unavailable children (Aaron Wolff and Jessica McManus) fall apart, Larry begins to slowly and painfully unravel as well.
The plot of A Serious Man has a fable-like quality. Larry encounters one obstacle after another, seeking council in various forms (usually receiving frustratingly cryptic advice in return, such as the “Story of the Goy’s Teeth”). The lesson the plot serves to teach is…well, we’re never quite sure what the lesson is. However, the story never stagnates, the dialogue stays fresh and punchy, and the supporting cast maintains a sharp sting of realism in their actions enough to keep from slipping into caricatures of themselves. Additionally, the lack of any moral certainty in the Coen brothers’ Yiddish-folk-tale structure only serves to heighten Larry’s questions about faith and meaning as his life goes from bad to worse.
Michael Stuhlbarg turn as Larry Gopnick stands as one of the brightest spots of this sparkling film. The relatively unknown actor (who originally auditioned for the role of Yiddish-speaking man in the film’s prologue) performs his role with amazing delicacy. As his deeply-repressed and entirely-unexamined emotions bubble to the surface, we cannot help but stare transfixed as he comes undone at his tweed-stitched seams.
Although this film’s merits are plentiful, it does occasionally dip into self-indulgence. One overly-dutch-titled, marijuana-induced sequence may have amused the directors more than the audience, and the film’s old-world Yiddish prologue, though successful on its own, had no useful comment on the rest of the story.
These flaws are all relatively minor, however. In its totality, A Serious Man is a rare mix of an entertaining story and a complete literary message. Though some may be put off by the film’s twists and turns, I would submit that this frustrating quality is its greatest artistic merit: just as Larry questions the rhyme and reason of God, the viewer is meant to question the random turns of the film’s story. And neither return an answer. A Serious Man, like the distinctly Old Testament God that its characters grapple with, does not give answers. Why, the audience may ask? As the rabbi in the film says, “I don’t know, He hasn’t told me yet.”
This film is among the strongest I’ve seen this year. It strikes the delicate balance between art and entertainment with hardly a false note, showing finesse in both storytelling and directing that only twenty years of filmmaking experience can produce. The key to enjoying this dark dramedy comes in one of the film’s funniest lines: “Accept the mystery.” Do this and you will not be disappointed.
Grade: A