A Serious Man

Having cranked out compelling, idiosyncratic absurdities for the last thirty years or so, the Coen Brothers continue to impress even when they don't overwhelm. And overwhelm they rarely do, in my opinion: their films are solidly constructed but they rarely fascinate; at their worst, they are marred by a sarcasm and a nastiness that turn them into cold abstractions, devoid of sincerity. The Coens' supporters would claim that this is their modus operandi: they knowingly place their movies in a modern world where meaning has died, where violence and catastrophe are accepted and tossed aside with alarming ease. Their detractors (such as me) would claim that, talented and clever though they are, they too easily give in to a fashionable glibness, making their condescending mockery of their characters so palpable that we have no choice but to treat the movies with a similar superior disdain.

My favorite Coen Brothers movies act as bookends in a way: with Blood Simple (1984), the budding directors laid the groundwork for their distinct aesthetic on a tiny budget, forging a dark yet powerful vision of the evil that men are so easily capable of; and twenty-three years later, with No Country for Old Men, the Coens created possibly their most disturbing maelstrom of violence, infusing it with an intricate and subtle portrayal of individual, personal tragedies presaging worldwide social catastrophe (in this case, the first War in Iraq). At times both of these movies exhibit the Coens' usual flaws, but they are undoubtedly powerful, intelligent, creative, singular movies.

In between there have been overrated works and forgettable misfires. Fargo is one of their most celebrated films, but it's also one of their cruelest, and not in any deep or perceptive way: characters are defined by quirky accents and geographical location, and a coolly distanced style holds any compelling theme at arm's length. The Big Lebowski is undoubtedly entertaining and its silly absurdity is ingratiating, but only to an extent--the movie is simply the Coens floating by on autopilot (though it's a testament to their skill that, even on autopilot, the results are so amusing). Raising Arizona is probably their funniest movie and features the most dexterous performances (by Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter) of any of their films, but its attitude towards lower-class characters is detestable: they're defined by dimwitted stares and yokelish personalities. And so on and so forth.

Hence, my belated desire to visit the Coens' 2009 movie, A Serious Man. Though it was one of the most heralded movies of last year, my anticipation for it was less than overwhelming, especially after the noxious misfire of Burn After Reading. But A Serious Man is something else entirely, a landmark not only for the Coens but for recent American film. Its comedy is expectedly dark but unexpectedly poignant; its anger comes not from a postmodern glibness but from a frustration at the inability to fathom the mysteries of life, God, sex, people. It marks a pinnacle of creative and thematic maturation for the Coens, for the first time (in my view) welding their idiosyncrasies to a genuine exploration of the morass of personal and social life.

The movie begins with a folktale: in a small village, perhaps somewhere in Eastern Europe, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a Yiddish woman is convinced that an elderly visitor is in fact a dybbuk--a ghost, an apparition--and stabs him with an ice pick. Maybe he is: he grumbles, quite reasonably, that he suddenly feels unwell, and stumbles out of the woman's home into a freezing blizzard. Was the woman right? We'll never know. This preface--which the Coens have admitted was entirely fabricated, although they were intending to replicate the air of an age-old Yiddish folktale--has no explicit bearing upon the story of A Serious Man, but it has definite thematic implications. What is the difference between life and death? Can faith in a benevolent higher power instill wisdom and righteousness in those who believe? These are the nagging questions that are asked, and remain unanswered, in A Serious Man.

Is the film the Coens' most veiled autobiography to date? As Midwesterners raised in the Jewish faith in the 1960s, the writers/directors have imbued A Serious Man with elements from their own upbringing. The film is broadly about the existential crises plaguing Larry Gopnik, a nebbishy physics professor living outside of Minneapolis in the 1960s. (The Coens' own father was a collegiate professor.) Painted with particular sympathy is Gopnik's son, an affable redhead who smokes weed before his bar mitzvah and who struggles throughout the film to retrieve his confiscated walkman from his school's headmaster. (When we are introduced to young Danny Gopnik, he is listening to Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love" on his headphones, the lyrics of which will reappear in an unexpected context later in the film.) As Danny bemusedly observes his family's downfall, we may suspect that he is indeed a stand-in for the Coens, especially considering the final moment of the film: Danny observes a cataclysmic tornado as he comes to a significant moral decision. It may not be a stretch, then, to consider that the end of A Serious Man may be the beginning of the Coens' entire philosophy: the generative moment in which one's opinions regarding the intricacies of life and ethics begin to take shape, carrying with them near-apocalyptic consequences.

There is an element of irony to the film: it is firmly rooted in the subculture of Midwestern Judaism, wryly observing the absurdities of esteemed rabbis who have no advice to offer or the painful pageantry of "getts"--ritualistic divorce ceremonies that allow former spouses to remarry; but at the same time it may be the most universally relatable of the Coens' films. The Yiddish rites portrayed in the film place A Serious Man in a distinct setting, but the overall satire of religious miscellanea doing nothing to alleviate one's lifelong confusion can be identified with by anyone who has pondered the existence of God or a discernible meaning to life. The film may gently mock Larry Gopnik and the absurd avalanche of difficulties that he is faced with, but it beleaguers him only because it identifies with him. For the first time, the Coens' philosophical concerns are almost completely aligned with their protagonist's: generally, a desperate attempt to resolve life's enigmas with religious faith, and the necessity of accepting that life can only be plagued by doubt, that nothing can be explained on an overarching existential level. One of A Serious Man's most memorable images--Larry's classroom lecture on the uncertainty principle, as he frustratedly claims that nothing can be explained as he's surrounded by a ludicrous amount of chalkboard scribbling--may be correlated to the Coens' oeuvre as a whole: a whole life's worth of science and/or art, all constituting an attempt to comprehend the painful confusion of life.

The movie is not perfect. Most glaringly questionable is A Serious Man's treatment of women. While Larry's son Danny is portrayed as a likable, if irresponsible, witness to the film's events, Larry's daughter Sarah is unfailingly shown as a self-involved debuttante futzing with her hair and screaming at her relatives. Larry's wife Judith is no better: not only does she torture Larry with possible infidelity, financial extortion, and constant ridicule, her every argument is emphasized as irrational and petty in comparison with Larry's desperate composure in the face of extreme difficulty. And the film's weakest subplot is Larry's extraneous fling with his sexpot of a neighbor: as we see her emotionlessly smoking pot as she grinds away on top of him, we are reminded of the Coens' emptiest moments--absolute misanthropy standing in for genuine angst.

But these flaws are partially forgivable when we consider the general arch of the film. Whereas the Coens' existential uncertainty usually takes the form of hollow cynicism, here we are truly affected by it because we understand. This becomes shockingly clear with the movie's disturbing ending, which interrupts the proceedings precisely when the Gopniks' personal tragedies explode, mushroom-cloud-like, into more destructive annihilation. If we'd like, we may extend this ending into the movie's historical context: set in the late 1960s, at the dawn of the Vietnam War, we may broaden the Coens' philosophies into a broader statement on war and terror and the role that faith plays in the functioning of orderly society as a whole. If the oppressive but small-scale tragedies that plague Larry force him into a debilitating existential crisis, then the onset of the Vietnam War (and international violence as a whole) pose an even greater enigma: how can good triumph in the face of constant and unchanging annihilation? This, too, can be traced back to A Serious Man's folktale prologue: the devout Yiddish woman may believe that Good will triumph and Evil will be vanquished, but this belief may simply be a religious falsification espoused for the sake of ongoing law and order. How can we believe that Good will triumph when the history of human existence has attested to the opposite? A Serious Man ends, then, with young Danny Gopnik observing an encroaching tempest and concluding that honesty and fairness are irrelevant in the midst of overwhelming destruction. This is a similar theme that the Coens suggested in No Country for Old Men: as a tornado of violence and inhumanity escalates, peaceful individuals have no choice but to embroil themselves in this same inevitable catastrophe.

A hopeful conclusion? Certainly not. But whereas the Coens' hopelessness has usually, before now, reflected exactly that--a deadened and resigned lack of hope, extended onto characters who don't deserve such cruelty--with A Serious Man that hopelessness is profound and, in a strange way, comforting. In everyday life, doubt and uncertainty reigns; institutionalized religion can, at its best, alleviate that doubt, but at its worst it can exacerbate it. We are left with nothing more than immediate human action: if that action constitutes war and greed, then life is made even more empty and less fathomable; but if humanity operates under the assumption that individuals are obligated to be decent and fair, then a certain compassionate philosophy maintains itself. A Serious Man, then, despite its dark agnosticism, represents an uncompromising form of humanism, concluding with the most benevolent philosophy available to those who have become convinced of life's complete senselessness: do good, because organized religion and existential philosophy can offer no other definitive substitute.