Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man opens with a Hebrew fable set in a 19th-century Polish shtetl — one involving a dybbuk, no less — before seguing to Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love” blasting out of a 13-year-old boy’s earplugs during a bar mitzvah class. Believe me, that seemingly discordant juxtaposition isn’t as berserk as it sounds.
In fact, the fable and song turn out to be the Coens’ guiding motifs
here. Set in a blandly pastoral midwestern suburb in 1967, the film is
reportedly the Coens’ most personal work. Larry Gopnick (New York stage
veteran Michael Stuhlbarg in a remarkable performance), the film’s
Job-like physics-professor protagonist, was modeled after their
college-professor dad, and the movie’s near-fetishistic details of
coming-of-age in the mid-’60s were taken directly from their own
Minnesota adolescence.
When Larry’s wife Judith (Sari Lennick) announces out of the blue
that she wants a divorce so she can marry unctuous family “friend” Sy
Ableman (Fred Melamed), his life quickly spirals out of control.
Reduced to living in a no-tell motel with his deadbeat brother (Richard
Kind), Larry is forced to take shit from every direction. His
department head wants to deny him tenure, a South Korean student (David
Kang) tries blackmailing him to get his grade changed, a Columbia
Record Club phone rep harasses him at work, his rabbi repeatedly blows
him off and his soon-to-be-bar-mitzvah son Danny (Aaron Wolff) is a
burgeoning pothead who complains that “F Troop is fuzzy” on the
family TV. What’s a self-professed “serious man” like Larry supposed to
do?
Perfectly pitched for maximum satirical effect and without an ounce
of fat, the film hits every mark and then some. The Coens’ famously
deadpan, stubbornly misanthropic worldview is alive and well, though
Coen-come-lately fans who didn’t discover the brothers until No
Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading are likely to be
puzzled, even turned off. (They’re liable to dismiss A Serious
Man as a long, elaborate, even mean-spirited Jewish joke.) But for
Coen completists who adore Barton Fink, think The Hudsucker
Proxy was criminally underrated and host bi-annual Big
Lebowski viewing parties (preferably at a neighborhood bowling
alley), A Serious Man is almost indecently
pleasurable.
So full of classic moments (including the funniest bar mitzvah on
record) that it’s impossible to catalog them after just one viewing,
the movie has more big laughs than any film released so far this year.
It’s also probably too “niche” (read: Jewish) to ever go beyond the
art-house ghetto where such previous Coen treasures as Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There and Miller’s Crossing were consigned
before finding eventual — and richly deserved — cult
followings on DVD. To quote a well-lubricated guest at Danny’s
comically surreal bar mitzvah party, “Mazeltov, it’s wonderful.”
This article appears in Oct 21-27, 2009.