A Serious Man
The film opens with a quote from French, eleventh-century Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki (also known as Rashi)—the first Talmudic scholar, “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.” In a Polish shtetl—small town, predominantly Jewish—a husband returning home welcomes Traitle Groshkover into their home. Skeptical, his wife declares that Groshkover died of typhus three years prior. A curse, she says, will forever plague them. She stabs him. Either she rescued their household from evil, or she committed a sin and they’re going to hell. The prologue is self-contained, having nothing to do with the rest of the narrative. Yet, the moral conundrum is at the film’s center.
The film cuts to 1967, where Danny Gopnik (Aaron Wolff) is listening to Jefferson Airplane over a transistor radio—his generation’s iPod—during a Hebrew language class at his school, B’Nai Abraham. Danny’s father, Larry (Michael Stuhlbarg), is having chest x-rays taken. Larry’s wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), is pursuing a “get”—a divorce decree—to be with the devious Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed). Complicating matters even further is Larry’s brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), a habitual gambler with a sebaceous cyst the nightly drainage of which makes disgusting, slurping noises. Why, Larry wonders, is the world collapsing on him?
Noted for their satires of human foibles, Joel and Ethan Coen have assembled a tragicomic parable about faith under pressure. Its chief protagonist (or victim), Larry, is an ineffectual man, taking crap from his domineering wife, entitlement-whoring children, and an obnoxious gentile stereotype of a neighbor who pulls his kid out of class to go hunting. Instead of pitying himself, it never occurs to Larry that he could simply do the same. He’s too honest and kind a fellow—unbelievably so. When he tells an Asian student attempting to bribe him out of a failing grade, he says, “Actions have consequences.”
The student, Clive Park (David Kang), replies, “Yes… often.”
A series of challenges to his ego arise, and knock him down repeatedly. The stalwart Larry never succumbs, certain that Hashem (god) is testing him. Though he has a budding fascination with his neighbor, Mrs. Samsky (Amy Landecker), who tans in the nude, drinks ice tea and smokes pot. Does he covet her, or the freedoms she enjoys while Mr. Samsky is away on business? “I saw Swedish reverie,” he admits to a coworker. “It wasn’t even erotic. It was… in a way.”
There’s a bit of Lester Burnham in Larry, but not enough to stir him to take command. As disaster brews around him, he is a spectator of his own life.
The Coen brothers use Larry as the static element against which the narrative spins out of control. But for all their cleverness, the story reads like a litany of Jewish stereotypes, from the imposing relative with a gross medical condition, to the impotent husband, the tyrannical wife, rabbis with a casual sense of humor about misfortune (and cryptic, if useless, diatribes), ancient patriarchal figures who clear their throats, and tremendously irritating neighbors or friends who feed into the protagonist’s persecution complex and paranoia. It’s all there, by rote.
It’s a funny film, but mostly to those who convince themselves that there’s truth behind every facet of Larry’s ludicrously-miserable existence. Natives of Minneapolis, my home of fourteen years, the Coens seem to be amused or vindictive, I can’t decide, about their heritage. Arthur’s vices get him into trouble at an establishment called “The North Dakota” and the attorney they pursue is Ron Meshbesher, not coincidentally a real attorney at the firm Meshbesher & Spence. Like the winks to Jewish culture and custom, these are probably lost on a broader audience. Strung together, they fail to flesh out a story rather than a series of vignettes of calamity.
That said, the film ends precisely on the right shot, leaving the viewer to conclude that either Hashem is punishing Larry for his sole transgression or that shit happens.
A Serious Man • Dolby® Digital surround sound in select theatres • Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 • Running Time: 105 minutes • MPAA Rating: R for language, some sexuality/nudity and brief violence. • Distributed by Focus Features