Movie Review: A Serious Man
I’ve said in the past that the Cohen brothers don’t make bad movies. The movies that don’t rank as high in their own particular canon are still better than about ninety percent of what everyone else is doing, and their best are as fine as cinema has to offer- see Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, and No Country For Old Men, among others. Where does this rank, in terms of their complete body of work? Somewhere in the middle. Some have said this is the Cohen’s most autobiographical work to date. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but in any case, it does deal with the most Jewish subject matter of any of their previous efforts. It’s set in a kind of suburban Jewish purgatory in the 1960’s where the protagonist, Larry Gopnik, a middle-aged professor at a small university, is on the verge of getting tenure. He learns that his wife wants a ceremonial divorce so that she can shack up with an overbearing rival, who, it is later revealed, has been sending unflattering letters to the committee that is deciding whether to grant Gopnik tenure. His brother, a reclusive loon who has been working unceasingly on a mathematical formula that can successfully predict future events, is living in his spare room, while his son, who is about to be bar mitzvah, is having trouble with a local tough who he owes money for buying pot. Various troubles begin to close in, and the result is a typical Cohen-flavored hodgepodge of hysterical encounters, highlighted by visits with the three rabbis at the local synagogue as Larry tries vainly to make sense of his world collapsing around him.
It’s all in good fun…except it’s not. The Cohens are absolute masters of making you laugh uproariously even as you cringe, and that’s what’s happening here. Yes, these events are funny, in some cases, but this is very much a black comedy, emphasis on black, and there’s much more at work here than simply sticking larger than life characters into humorous situations. On a larger scale, this is about what happens when a life, particularly that of a passive person, begins to implode, without their having any knowledge why or what they can do about it. It’s as sad as it is funny, especially with the pervading sense of doom through which the Cohen’s infuse this entire undertaking, through expertly applied camera work, use of music, sound, and volume, and intentional blurring of certain portions of the screen, to name a few of their traditional bag of tricks. It works to perfection, for the most part. It’s what the Cohen’s have been doing for two decades. They got it right the first time, and the formula hasn’t changed.
It seems like the Cohens vary how much of themselves they put into their work. On certain occasions it seems like they’re just being a little playful as they gear themselves up for their next “important” project. In this case, the effort is fairly evident, and so this movie is largely successful. There may be some who will be turned off by this piece because of the heavily Jewish content, but I don’t think this endeavor won’t pay dividends just because you aren’t a member of the tribe. After all, the Jewish aspect is just a backdrop; if some of the individual details are lost due to religious or cultural ignorance, at the end of the day this is still about asking God the big questions, foremost among them “why the hell is this happening to me?” and each and every one of us, of any culture, should be able to relate to that. Overall, a wicked, darkly funny, and, at times, painful comedy with serious issues peaking out from behind the facade. My rating: 7/10.