TIFF Review: The Coen Brothers' A Serious Man

Here’s another review from the Toronto International Film Festival—of a film I actually liked this time!


Michael Stuhlbarg in A Serious Man.

Can I make a confession? I’m not usually a fan of things that are super Jewish. Jewish I like. In fact, Jewish I love! My list of Jewish cultural heroes ranges from Franz Kafka to Bob Dylan to Sarah Silverman, with about a bazillion stops in between. But super-Jewish stories about shtetls and magic-realist rabbis—all that Fiddler on the Roof crap? Meh! I’m Irish American, with my own schmaltzy ancestral pseudohistory to mythologize, feel guilty about, and feel superior for overcoming. Spare me the Nathan Englander routine. I don’t need another nightmare to wake up from.

Prejudices are made to be renounced, though. For example, just when I swore I’d never willingly sit through another exigesis of the cultural dislocations of the 60s, Mad Men landed and revived the entire genre for me. (I still refuse to see Taking Woodstock though.) And now along comes A Serious Man, which is as super-Jewish as the Coen brothers are likely ever to get. It’s also seriously awesome.One reason is that it’s the opposite of a soft-headed meditation on love, faith, and destiny. Instead, it’s an extremely hard-headed meditation on love, faith, and destiny. It starts with the kind of period flashback that usually gives me the hives: in snowy rural Poland, a thickly bearded man arrives home to tell his stonefaced wife—in subtitled Yiddish—that he just had a chance encounter with an old friend of hers. “God has cursed us!” she declares. The man in question died years ago. Then there’s a thump on the door. The man—or is he a “dybbuk,” as the wife insists—has arrived, at the husband’s invitation. If it weren’t a Coen brothers movie, you expecting this to be followed with some cornball special effects and a neatly wrapped lesson. Instead, you just know that someone could be fed into the proverbial wood chipper at any moment.

Without giving too much away, though, I would submit that there is a lesson here, or at least a dilemma—one that tastes more and more bitter as the movie chews away on it. Is the visitor a man or a dybbuk? Is the wife mistaken, or is she more right than her husband wants to believe? We were left with a similar question at the end of the Coen brothers’ last film, No Country for Old Men: was Javier Bardem an evil man or evil incarnate? When he walked away from that car accident at the end, was he defeated or just momentarily hobbled, soon to return to his spree of destruction?

For most of its length, A Serious Man concerns the Job-like sufferings of Larry Gopnik, a suburban Jewish physics professor whose status as a long-suffering everyman is punctuated by the filmmakers’ decision to have him portrayed by the relatively unknown (yet brilliant) Michael Stuhlbarg. Larry’s life, when we meet him, is pretty depressing, but he seems grateful enough for it. That changes when his domineering wife decides to leave him for an insufferable widower. Suddenly the fact that his kids are self-absorbed brats, that his brother is a jobless, friendless social leper, that his job is threatened by a grade-obsessed foreign-exchange student, and that his goy neighbor quite evidently hates his guts—suddenly all that stuff doesn’t seem as tolerable as it once did. Eventually, he turns to religion for support, but the rabbis he approaches—there are three of them, each more experienced, and inscrutable, than the last—can’t give him the answer he wants. Why is this happening to him? All religion can tell him is that it’s God’s will. But is that really true? Why would God want to punish him this way? It’s impossible to say.

Joel and Ethan Coen are chasing something dark and frightening across the flat Minnesota landscape that spawned them. Jewish customs, from numerology to the Bar Mitzvah ceremony—which provides the context for one of the best drug-haze sequences since The Big Lebowski—give the story its color and contours, but faith itself—not the Jewish faith—is the subject at hand. Larry, who knows well the uncertainty principle of mathematics, wants to know if there’s a plan and, if so, what part he’s supposed to play. But as an audience member, it’s hard to say which would be more frightening: a universe without order and meaning or one ruled by a God who rains suffering down on his hapless children for reasons known only to himself.