A Serious Man (2009)
Directed by Ethan Coen
It is 1967, and Larry Gopnik, a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university, has just been informed by his wife Judith that she is leaving him. He scrambles to find a semblance of meaning as he loses control of nearly every aspect of his life.
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What critics say influenced A Serious Man
The Coens' direction of their actors reminded me of the time Werner Herzog reportedly hypnotized his cast for "Heart of Glass" - everyone but their lead, with the exception of Jessica McManus, is preternaturally calm (or stoned) and speaks in a quasi-reassuring monotone.
This piling-on, no-way-out-but-down narrative strategy has worked for brilliant thriller-makers like Brian De Palma in "Carrie" and "Blow-Out" or inspired provocateurs like Luis Bunuel.
A Serious Man begins, after a gnomic prologue, with what might be the inverse of the beginning of David Lynch's Blue Velvet.
We've seen mayhem play out in this arena many times before, from Blue Velvet to American Beauty , Revolutionary Road and TV's Mad Men , and if you're a suburbanite it's easy to see the condescension coming at you in spadefuls.
At the end of Love and Death (1975) Woody Allen concludes that if God exists, while he may not be evil, he could be termed an underachiever.
In this sense, it's their "Amarcord" or "Radio Days," albeit less episodic and sentimental than Federico Fellini's or Woody Allen's reflections on their youths were.
As expressly Torah-informed as Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors , but without that film's genuine ethical gravity, A Serious Man is formed around the contest between the reasonless chaos of life and our traditional cultures' desire to see order in it; but there's not much real discourse on hand, and no larger metaphysical idea.
There’s a strong whiff of Woody Allen to this cultural contrast (think the split-screen family dinners in Annie Hall), though filtered through the darker lens of the Coens’ vision.
In a comic episode that resembles a Woody Allen short story or a chapter of “Deconstructing Harry,” the Coens go off on a tangent about a Jewish dentist who becomes obsessed when he finds Hebrew letters that form a distinct message are carved into the back sides of the teeth of one of his patients — a goy.
Wife Judith's (Sari Lennick, whose piercing pupils set in pale green irises make her otherworldly) lover Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed, "Hollywood Ending") keeps trying to hug Larry while the Coens work fateful dualities and two faces into the relationship.
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In this sense, it's their "Amarcord" or "Radio Days," albeit less episodic and sentimental than Federico Fellini's or Woody Allen's reflections on their youths were.
Like most Coen brothers movies, “A Serious Man” isn’t like most Coen brothers movies, although it’s reminiscent of “Barton Fink” in the claustrophobic way it burrows into the head of its main character.
After achieving perhaps their greatest critical success (and multiple Oscars) for No Country for Old Men and boffo box office for their inspired comic follow-up Burn After Reading, they've gone and made their most befuddling picture since Barton Fink.
While not reaching the heights of insanity of such films as “Barton Fink,” “Serious Man” remains a pretty strange movie for Joel and Ethan Coen.
3 1/2 Stars (out of 4) Tweet The Enigma of Teeth By Jeffrey M. Anderson The fourteenth feature film by Joel and Ethan Coen is a head-scratcher as puzzling as Barton Fink (1991), but at the same time, it's a humanistic and emotionally moving work, reaching some of the high points of Fargo (1996).
But at least now I get Barton Fink.
Even by Coen standards -- and I'm talking about the guys who made "Barton Fink," "The Big Lebowski" and "No Country for Old Men" -- "Serious" is opaque and inscrutable and indirect.
The film recalls Fargo (1996) in era and tone.
As they have done mostly in the years since winning the Original Screenplay for Fargo back in 1996, the Coens have found inspiration in a previously written work even when their screenplays are considered “original”.
"Fargo" is still one of their best pictures, and yet when you compare it to "No Country for Old Men," it looks a little obvious.
3 1/2 Stars (out of 4) Tweet The Enigma of Teeth By Jeffrey M. Anderson The fourteenth feature film by Joel and Ethan Coen is a head-scratcher as puzzling as Barton Fink (1991), but at the same time, it's a humanistic and emotionally moving work, reaching some of the high points of Fargo (1996).
“A Serious Man” can’t rely on the genre elements that made the Coens’ “No Country for Old Men” and “Fargo” thrilling, but there is creepy suspense in the way the world closes in on Larry.
Hard to tell, if only because—aside from Fargo 's Marge Gunderson, one of the great creations of American cinema—just about every character the Coens create is meant to affirm their own superiority.
What Anton Chigurh, Javier Bardem's pitiless mass murderer, was to No Country for Old Men , the Hebrew God (whom the characters refer to with the respectful, indirect name of "Hashem") is to this movie.
After achieving perhaps their greatest critical success (and multiple Oscars) for No Country for Old Men and boffo box office for their inspired comic follow-up Burn After Reading, they've gone and made their most befuddling picture since Barton Fink.
It even worked for the Coens when they played Cormac McCarthy straight in "No Country for Old Men."
For 25 years now Joel and Ethan Coen ( No Country for Old Men , Burn After Reading ) have been making stylish and meticulously constructed films that reveal their deep love and knowledge of cinema.
Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen ("No Country for Old Men"), "A Serious Man" is a comedy of discomfort — and one of their best, most insightful and most provocative films.
That gamut is growing into a serious catalog with “Burn After Reading,” 2007 best-picture Oscar winner “No Country for Old Men,” “The Ladykillers,” “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” “The Big Lebowski,” “Fargo” and “Raising Arizona” now under their yamakas over the course of two decades.
I like the Coens best when they’re delivering either full-on demented comedy (“Raising Arizona,” “The Hudsucker Proxy,” “The Big Lebowski”) or when, as in “No Country for Old Men,” they work hard to establish the humanity of their characters.
For perhaps the first time in a Coen film outside No Country we are asked to authentically empathise with a realistic character in a realistic setting, and yet he and the landscape around him suffer the same lampooning slings and sardonic tone as the characters of Raising Arizona (1987), Barton Fink (1991), Fargo (1995) and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000).
The sort of critic who was capable of carrying that dramatically poor misreading intact from Raising Arizona into Fargo and The Big Lebowski and so on is going to have a field day with A Serious Man, which apparently serves as just so much more fuel for that particular fire.
As the Jewish material in such films as "Barton Fink" and "Miller's Crossing" already demonstrates, the Coens don't run from ethnic clichés.
It’s not an aspect that’s come up much in their work — there were a couple of Jewish characters in "Miller’s Crossing," and John Goodman was hilarious as a defensive convert in "The Big Lebowski" -- but their Midwesternness has been more apparent.
The Coens have only occasionally stumbled into a fascinating world-view (for all of its genre irony, 1990's Miller's Crossing gets my vote), because they are instead masters of minutiae.
I like the Coens best when they’re delivering either full-on demented comedy (“Raising Arizona,” “The Hudsucker Proxy,” “The Big Lebowski”) or when, as in “No Country for Old Men,” they work hard to establish the humanity of their characters.
Though there are no acting epiphanies here to rival Tony Shalhoub's in Barton Fink or Jennifer Jason Leigh's in The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), A Serious Man doesn't have a single dull or merely functional performance; even bit players have their pregnant comic moments.
It begins with a truly peculiar prologue that plays like Fiddler on the Roof by way of Franz Kafka.
Larry is the secular embodiment of Tevye's good-natured complaint from Fiddler on the Roof (a movie that would make a swell double-feature with the Coen film): "I know, I know.
Unlike “Goodbye Columbus” or “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz”, there is a kind of surreal quality to the goings on in suburban Minneapolis that suggests David Lynch rather than Larry David.
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As Larry, the gifted Michael Stuhlbarg is a bit like the Matthew Broderick of “Election,” a harried, mostly nice guy who’s so consumed with his problems that he can’t see straight.
He is one of the few actors alive who could convincingly deliver Joel and Ethan's comically highbrow dialogue in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), brood in deep existential angst in Steven Soderbergh's Solaris (2002), and lead a Rat Pack-worthy crew of high-stakes, well-dressed criminals in the three Ocean's films.