A Serious Man (2009)

Joel & Ethan Coen: Directors, Writers

Michael Stuhlbarg, Sari Lennick , Richard Kind, Fred Melamed

If you’re like me, than there has been an occasion or 2 where you have had a bit of a mental breakdown. I mean an irrational, throw-something, stamp-your-feet-like-a 4-year-old, possibly toss-out-a-couple-of-choice-phrases, freak-out. Whether it was a ludicrously unfair grade, a fight with your mother, or frankly someone cutting you off in traffic, we’ve all been there…. Well, all of us except for the down-on-his-luck protagonist of A Serious Man. Though not for a lack of cause.

Larry Gopnik (Stuhlbarg), a morally conscientious Jewish professor, just can’t catch a break in this 1960’s dramady. Between his utterly unappreciative family - complete with a son more interested in getting high than in learning the Torah, a nose job obsessed daughter and a brother who can’t seem to clear up that massive cyst  - anyone would justifiably lose it. Add into that a delightfully corrupt Korean student trying to bribe him and a wife who calmly informs him of her plan to leave him, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for a nervous wreck. And yet, Larry takes it in relative stride, responding to every crisis with merely panic stricken be-spectacled eyes and brief stuttering responses which nearly always get shouted down.

The Coen brothers really beat up on poor Mr. Gopnik, almost to the point where it’s painful to watch. You find yourself thinking “ok this has got to be it, he’s going to snap.” Then the next crisis. “This has got to be it.” When he interrupts his $150 an hour session with the divorce lawyer only to find that his son’s impending crisis is, yet again, that his favorite television show is blurry, your heart breaks for the poor, hard working father who is stuck playing the punching bag. You’re cheering for him to start an affair with the sexy next door neighbor, to take the bribe, to tell off his domineering wife. By hour 2, you’re about ready for someone to find ol’ Larry strung up in the bathroom.

The characters, though you kind of want to punch them, are exceptionally crafted, as is the screenplay which rolls effortless between a series of personal nightmares. From a Fort Knox of spiritual guidance to his wife’s infuriatingly patronizing would-be lover, the Coen brothers create vignette after vignette that has the audience reeling, relating and empathizing with Larry. I mean honestly, who hasn’t tried to calmly explain something during a fight and had their words twisted and turned until they find themselves agreeing, inexplicably with the counterargument? So is the plight of Mr. Gopnik. 

I cannot truly say that I came away from this film feeling a terrific sense of enlightenment or with a new take of the destiny of mankind. Funny, heartbreaking, bleak and, in a word, odd, it starts out with a Jewish family in the early 20^th century inviting in a dybbuk (a Hebrew name for a spirit inhabiting a dead person) in for soup then stabbing him with an ice pick. Perhaps setting the theme for the search for meaning that pervades the film, the audience is left wondering, “What did that meant? Are they going to explain it? Who were those people?” And…. they do not. Then, in a full circle maneuver, the film ends abruptly, once again leaving the audience searching for significance, something to grasp on to and take home with them. If you feel like taking in a head scratcher and you don’t mind leaving a theatre feeling depressed and perhaps a little disoriented, this former Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture nominee is right up your alley.