Ten Years of "A Serious Man"
Thursday, October 17, 2019 at 9:00PM by new contributor Michael Frank
The Coen brothers have always been masters of crafting a world the audience vaguely understands, but has never experienced. They create characters that are utterly ridiculous, acutely specific, yet still relatable to the common audience member. After 10 years, their dark comedy A Serious Man holds up better than even they could have imagined. It’s a twisted laughfest that agonizes and tickles for a wildly enjoyable 100 minutes.
A Serious Man isn’t a movie that I’ve rewatched time and time again. It’s one I’ve jumped in and out of over the last 10 years, seeing a snippet here, a snippet there. If you jump into any part of the film, the atmosphere is always the same. You’re quick to realize the plight of Larry Gopnik, and the rapid shrinking of his happiness...
I’d forgotten the hilarity of this tale about a Jewish man’s life. The “cold open”, an old fable of curses, dybbuks, and death, sets the tone for this film. It reels you in and introduces you to the major elements of the story: faith, death, and dark comedy. It’s an incredible seven minutes that only the Coen brothers would be gutsy enough to pull off.
We follow the life and times of Larry Gopnik, played with magnificent bewilderment by Michael Stuhlbarg, as his whole world begins to crumble. His teaching career, his marriage, his family, and his health are bursting at the seams, threatening to rip apart of his entire life. Though we continue to feel bad for Larry, who is a genuinely nice man, the Coens make it impossible to not laugh along. The ridiculousness of the events is too much to handle, regardless of your empathetic notions.
With Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love” blasting throughout, the movie seems too perfect to be true in its depiction of 1967 Minnesota suburbia.
Here’s a list of some moments that relate to Larry, in increasing order of laughter provided:
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His doctor is smoking as he looks through Larry’s test results.
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He gets into a car accident. Only funny because of its compounding nature.
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His brother Arthur continues to drain his cyst whenever he pleases.
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Sy Ableman -- just a great name -- starts meddling in his marriage.
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His lawyer seems to have a heart attack while he’s in the room.
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His student, Clive Park, keeps asking for a secret test and saying “hush hush” while trying to improve his grades and bribing Larry. Then Clive’s father visits Larry in an exchange worthy of a Coen brothers top 10 dialogue list.
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Sy dies and Larry has to pay for his funeral.
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He’s living at the Jolly Roger motel. The name itself is perfect.
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His son gets quite high at his bar mitzvah, performs in an odd nature, which in turn moves both Larry and his wife, Judith. This leads indirectly to him (likely) receiving tenure.
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He visits two rabbis, the second of which telling him a story about teeth that adds up to nothing.
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Sy Ableman gives him a hug and a bottle of wine when he comes to Larry’s home. Then Sy counts to 10 with him while holding his hands.
It’s a film that isn’t wasting scenes or time, moving at a brisk pace, not allowing the audience to breathe in between chuckles. Every scene is used to further aggravate Larry’s circumstances. The amount of layers become almost hard to follow, due to the piling up of difficulties he’s managing.
Larry is even teaching his class about “the uncertainty principle” which he states “proves we never really know what’s going on,'' the ideal lesson lodged into the back half of the film. Stuhlbarg is brilliant through it all, as a deer-in-headlights looks is plastered onto his face, one of reconciliation instead of reckoning. An Oscar nomination should’ve been a given.
A Serious Man has much to say about the Jewish community, about masculinity, and about religion. It’s a movie that is full of religious talk, but absent of a godly presence. Larry is largely abandoned. His faith is waning, as ours usually does when the path takes unwanted twists and turns. God becomes the butt of the joke, and the Coens are content to keep it that way, at least for these 100 minutes. It doesn’t mean he isn’t present, but it does mean that he might just be busy.
In 2009, A Serious Man was hailed as a masterpiece. Not much has changed since.
Reader Comments (8)
Stuhlbarg is such a treasure. This is when I like the Coens best - quirky and funny with a biting melancholy hovering in the background.
I fucking love this film. My favorite scene is when Larry's son is high on dope as he talks to the elder rabbi who recites lyrics to "Somebody to Love" and names the members of Jefferson Airplane.
And Stuhlbarg is still not recognized by the academy!
This movie is one of my favorites - Michael Stuhlbarg the biggest reason, he's so heartbreakingly fantastically good in everything - but I really loved what this movie was doing.
I walked out of the theatre thinking "I love this movie" and was about to say that to my friend, when I heard someone saying "I hated it" - and I just thought, yup, I can see that.
Love it.
I think about the last shot of the movie very often. Brilliant movie.
My favorite Coen Bros. film by a mile. A masterpiece.
I can't get over that, to start with, they wrote such a fantastic screenplay, much less made it into such an unique, outstanding film. Considering how unfocused and only intermittently brilliant their last couple of projects have been, A Serious Man looks better all the time. I have never seen a film that mixes laugh-out-loud comedy so intimately with dead serious philosophical questioning. It packs so much into its short runtime. You don't have to be Jewish to love it... but it couldn't hurt!
A couple of things to add:
This the most autobiographical of all Coen projects - they were Danny's age growing up in that midwestern Jewish community in the sixties. It's a skeleton key to their worldview, concerns, and thinking, providing some inside info about THEM that you don't get in the (great, but distant from their own experience) genre pastiches that mainly fill their filmography.
And speaking personally... I was also like Danny, we were part of a Jewish congregation and community in the sixties, I was a bar mitzvah in 1968. The film's recreation of a sixties Jewish community is ASTOUNDINGLY accurate to my own experience! Every aspect, from production design and costumes to the casting of the smallest parts, the vocabulary of the dialog, the characters' attitudes, virtually everything, is shockingly believable and familiar.
About that ambiguous last shot - which is a perfect ending. Since Larry's story is essentially a retelling of the Book of Job - how a righteous man deals with calamity and loss and maintains his faith - it's worth noting that at the climax of that story, the voice of God "comes out of the whirlwind". There's an amazing amount of Biblical stuff in the margins here: e.g., Larry on the roof being entranced seeing Mrs. Samsky sunbathing topless: David and Bathsheba, anyone?
One of MANY interesting essays out there on this great film worth a look:
http://www.asharperfocus.com/Serious.html
It's a really really good film, after Fargo, my favorite from the Coens. Stuhlbarg is fantastic and the story is multilayered. It's one of those rewatch-it-every-5-to-7-years-or-so type movies.