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Ten Days Of The Coen Brothers: Day Ten Part One

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10 years ago

March 7, 2016

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Questions Without Answers

♦ With the release of Hail, Caesar! in the UK on 4 March, Tripwire kicks off a look at all of the Coen Brothers films released to date. Yesterday we took a look at their thirteenth film Burn After Reading (2008) and now our editor-in-chief Joel Meadows takes a look at their fourteenth movie A Serious Man (2009).

A Serious Man

Director: Joel Coen

Stars: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick

Just a year after the eminently forgettable Burn After Reading, the Coens took another radical swerve in direction with A Serious Man. It was as if, just two years after they had won the Oscar for No Country For Old Men, that the pair decided that they would confound the people they brought with them for that film with this, arguably the strangest movie they had made to date in thirty years as filmmakers.

Set in the cradle of the Coen mythos, late 1960s Minnesota, Stuhlbarg plays Larry Gopnik, a Jewish physics teacher wrestling with questions of faith and his place in the universe. His life is turned upside down when his wife informs him that she has been having an affair with Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed) and wants a divorce. Gopnik’s bizarre brother, mathematician Arthur (Richard Kind) lives with him in the family home, eking out an existence that seems neither satisfying or complete.

The film is a hazily skewed look at the burdens that people place on themselves, especially in this setting. From the deliberately unsettling opening scene, set in Eastern Europe in the 19th century, to the hapless Gopnik being engulfed by his demons, baffled as to what God has planned for him, the film looks at the baggage carried by diaspora Jews in this remote corner of America, although it is evident despite the opaque narrative that the Coens have no answers to their collective plight. Stuhlbarg is magnificent as the archetypal Coen misshape, struggling vainly to live in a way that is pious and correct while besieged on all sides by the hollow distractions and encroaching indifference of modern life. His wife’s lover, played by Melamed, is also a fantastic, monstrous creation although he is written out of this bizarre period drama halfway through. The rest of the cast are also very strong, with Kind as Gopnik’s brother, portraying a rather tragic figure, directionless and pathetic. There are some wonderful cameos here too as you would expect: The Big Bang Theory‘s Simon Helberg plays the innocent, unworldly young Rabbi Scott while TV veteran George Wyner is Rabbi Nachtner. There’s also a superb, albeit short cameo from Adam Arkin as Gopnik’s lawyer, not to mention Michael Lerner, who was so brilliant in Barton Fink, turns up as Solomon Schlutz, whose only purpose as a character here is to expire onscreen.

Gopnik turns to religion and a number of rabbis in his desperate need for answers but quickly finds that all they do is stonewall him with more questions, which of course parallels the audience’s experience. And with this being a warts and all Coen extravaganza delineating their faded, shabby past, we are grateful, ironically, that there are no easy answers for us in any of the characters’ predicaments. The brothers’ usual collaborators meanwhile bring the Minnesota of 1967 to life with bold immersion and style. The presence of music here from Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix, despite their incongruity in such a staid backdrop, really helps to add an extra layer to the whole experience. The wholesale otherness of Jews living in the Pale of Minnesota, an isolated place known for its Scandinavian WASP community, is also driven home here, manifested through Gopnik’s unreconstructed Teutonic neighbour Mr Brandt (Peter Breitmayer).

A Serious Man is a drama that is ambiguous, oblique, and disorientatingly odd – derived as it is from the Coens’ spiritual haven (or is it prison?), the engine of their marginalized, at times lost, Americana . It is a film that only the Coen Brothers could make, a garish, sorrowful journey through their hermetic Jewish experience, a movie about powerlessness and being cast adrift, all the while being unaware of the answers, or even the questions, to existence.

Sometimes this movie can be wilfully arch and inaccessible, all too keen to unbalance the viewer, simultaneously distancing the audience while drawing them in. But A Serious Man is probably the boldest and most daring film the Coen Brothers ever made.

JOEL MEADOWS