A Serious Man

Not for the first time, a Coen Brothers film begins with a prologue that may make you wonder if you’ve strayed into the wrong cinema by mistake. We’re in a nineteenth-century Polish shtetl, and a husband and wife, speaking Yiddish with English subtitles, ask themselves if the rabbi the man met on the road really was alive or was a dybbuk. The Coens and their regular DP Roger Deakins even shoot this sequence in Academy Ratio, pillarboxing the image as the rest of the film is in 1.85:1. (They don’t go all the way by filming in black and white, though.)

Then, after twelve minutes, the opening credits kick in with a blast of Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love”, and we’re in the late Sixties in the Midwest. Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a physics teacher who has a lot of problems. His brother Arthur (Richard Kind), whose social skills are distinctly lacking, works obsessively on his abstruse mathematical treatise, when he isn’t monopolising the bathroom for draining a large sebaceous cyst on the back of his neck. His wife Judith (Sari Lennick) wants to leave him for Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed). His son Danny (Aaron Wolff) and daughter Sara (Jessica McManus) bicker constantly. A mail order record club harasses Larry for payment for purchases he hasn’t made. A Korean student tries to persuade him to up his grade to a pass and attempts bribery when Larry refuses. When Larry climbs on the roof to fix the TV aerial, because Danny complains that the reception for (60s sitcom) F Troop is fuzzy, he spies his neighbour (Amy Landecker), who is given to sunbathing nude and keen to take advantage of “the new freedoms”.

Following the Oscar-winner No Country for Old Men and the all-star farce of Burn After Reading, A Serious Man is much less easily classifiable, as a very culturally-specific (Jewish) character-led black comedy. Larry is something like a Woody Allen-style nebbish, but the film’s humour is much darker, mordant and at times disturbing than Allen’s. But, unlike in some other Coen films (though I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing), you care about this much put-upon protagonist…and also his son, with whom the film proper begins and ends, and who is very much a second lead.



The film proceeds on the principle that just when you think you’ve turned a corner, life, fate, the Universe, God, or whatever, will come along and shit on you from a great height. That’s how I read the film’s ending, which is so open-ended that it will no doubt infuriate as many as it delights. Some may have issues with what they see as Jewish stereotypes, but since the Coens are Jews from the Midwest, I’ll cut them slack on that one. I was less convinced by the Korean who speaks of a “culture crash”, though, though I'm no authority on Koreans.

What isn’t in doubt is the quality of the writing, which I’m convinced is the real strength of the Coens’ best work. The screenplay’s structure is precision itself, with seeming digressions (such as a story one rabbi tells Larry, about a dentist who finds Hebrew letters inscribed on the inside of a patient’s teeth) all having a place. They know the rules of screenwriting and structure inside out, and are capable of throwing narrative curveballs at the audience when they need to. The dialogue is a pleasure to listen to, shot through with a very penetrating wit. Stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg shines as Larry, but casting across the board is spot-on. Many of the smaller roles are filled by actors with very expressive faces, which means that they make an impression with little or in some cases no dialogue. Visually, the direction and Deakins’s camerawork is more restrained than has sometimes been the case, but it's perfectly appropriate for the job.

On a single viewing, I’m not convinced this is quite the Coens’ best work, though it’s certainly at the top end. (This comes from someone who has been a Coens fan since seeing Blood Simple in the mid 1980s, though they’ve had some misfires.) Fans will certainly gain a lot from it, though non-fans may be nonplussed.