A Serious Man

“Embrace the mystery,” one character advises another in A Serious Man. This being a Coen Brothers movie, this bit of guidance proves satiric, even ridiculous, on the surface. We’re in 1960s suburban Minnesota, and put upon physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) has been surreptitiously bribed by a student to receive a passing grade on his midterm exam. When he refuses to change the mark, the student’s father appears on Larry’s front yard, accusing Larry of simultaneously defaming his son’s character (by claiming he left bribe money) and accepting said bribe money. But how is it logically possible, Larry asks in exasperation, that he could be guilty of both at the same time? The father pauses for a moment, before delivering the aforementioned pearl of wisdom with matter-of-fact certainty.

There are a lot of scenes like this in A Serious Man: baffling brushes with the incomprehensibility of the universe, where other people prove benignly unhelpful at best and actively detrimental at worst. Joel and Ethan Coen have long populated their eclectic oeuvre with desperate schemers whose best laid plains fall apart in the face of an inscrutable and pitiless world. And while watching their frantic—and futile—attempts to regain control of their destinies are often played for laughs, there’s no mistaking the anxiety humming just beneath the surface, the disquieting sense that the center will not hold for much longer.

With all due respect to their stark and relentless No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man might be the Coen Brothers’ most elegant and artistically successful iteration of this long-gestating theme. Though spiked with some of their sharpest humor in years, this chronicle of one man’s attempts to understand why his life is falling apart finds its laughs in a rich and dark vein of existential apprehension, where community provides little solace and religion offers few answers. More than ever before, one gets the sense that, while the brothers remain distanced and even cynical observers of their characters’ plights, they connect with the dread that undergirds their protagonist’s frantic search for meaning. Their lips may be curled in a smirk, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t trembling in fear and pity.

This amplified emotional intensity may stem partly from the fact that, unlike many Coen characters, Larry isn’t a two-bit crook. He’s a middle-class academic and family man, living a life of reasonable contentment in a heavily Jewish enclave of Minnesota. Sure, daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) has a major case of adolescent attitude, his teenage son Danny (Aaron Wolff) secretly tokes up at any given opportunity, and Arthur (Richard Kind), his lost soul of a brother, has taken up semi-permanent residence in their living room. But these feel like relatively minor issues in a largely-settled existence: one that soon begins to unravel with alarming frequency. His wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), informs Larry that she’s leaving him for family friend Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed) and soon kicks him out of the house. His tenure case becomes endangered when the committee begins to receive anonymous letters deriding Larry’s reputation. Incidents just keep piling up—the student bribe; mysterious phone messages from the Columbia Record Company; unspoken tensions between Larry and his glowering neighbor—and no one can tell Larry why. The rabbis at his temple offer little more than glib catchphrases or inscrutable parables, only feeding his doubts.

The film is essentially a series of fruitless conversations, and every interaction feels sharply-drawn, specific, and representative of the directors’ finely-tuned ear for absurdity and doublespeak. Their films have often been populated with caricatures, and A Serious Man is no exception. Here, though, it makes thematic sense; their lack of relatability only underlines Larry’s increasing bewilderment and isolation from a world he only thought he knew. Stuhlbarg makes for a perfect Everymensch in these scenes, with a finely-calibrated performance that vacillates between comic exasperation and haunting despair.

Merely describing A Serious Man as a man encountering a series of philosophical and spiritual dead-ends, though, doesn’t begin to explain its contrapuntal rhythms and striking tonal shifts. The directors’ tightly-controlled aesthetic is on full display here, with exacting compositions and low-angled shots (by their brilliant DP Roger Deakins) that create a suburban world at once nondescript and stultifying. These become juxtaposed, however, with interludes of evocative ambiguity, deadpan surrealism, and peculiar buoyancy: Larry getting high with his seductive neighbor; Danny receiving some surprisingly hip (if nevertheless abstruse) advice from an aged rabbi; Larry standing on his roof, gazing out ambivalently over his generic suburban neighborhood as Carter Burwell’s score mournfully surges around him.

These moments free A Serious Man from the hermetic, aloof quality that tends to suffocate some of the Coens’ lesser genre retreads (I’m looking at you, Intolerable Cruelty). One feels the investment they have in the central questions swirling at the center of this film—the existence and character of a higher power; the value of belief in a world seemingly ruled by random chance—and it enlivens them to explore their emotional implications with energy and precision. A Serious Man keeps expanding its grave vision as it progresses, unveiling layers of anguish even as it maintains its unsparing sense of humor. It’s this artistic commitment that pushes A Serious Man into greatness, and you feel it right up to its stunning final moments. The Coen brothers have embraced the mystery, and it’s a terrifying and wondrous thing to behold.

                                            Matt Connolly