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A Serious Man

USA 2009
Directed by
Ethan Coen / Joel Coen
105 minutes
Rated MA

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
3.5 stars

Serious Man, A

Synopsis: Jewish mathematics professor, Larry Gropnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), is an all-round decent guy. Although he hasn't done anything to warrant it, things aren’t going his way. His wife is leaving him for a friend, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), his kids have no interest in him and he lusts after his sexy neighbour. He is supporting his dysfunctional brother (Richard Kind) and a Korean student is trying to blackmail him into giving him a passing grade. Larry needs help or at least an explanation but to an arch-rationalist, the rabbis he sees can give no answers that satisfy.

A Serious Man is a comedy of unassuming proportions but marvellous felicity. When you realize that Joel and Ethan Coen head the creative team behind it, that conjunction makes sense. The Coens have a CV of matchless variety that is distinguished by their dark wit and formidable cinematic skills. In recent years they have tended to travel the main film roads, largely due to their limousine casting, but with this offering they take a delightful detour off the highway and back in time.

The place is a Jewish community in Midwest USA and the time is the late 1960s. That spatio-temporal nexus accounts for thirty three and a third per-cent of the delights of this film. As ever with the Coens, the look is just right. Whether it’s the cars, the hair and wardrobe, the domestic or institutional settings, the streetscapes or the built environment, the production design is flawless. Whilst this will be a marvel in itself for anyone who likes such things, the setting is an integral part of the story. Larry lives in a suburban estate where the houses are perfectly ordered and the lawns carefully mown, the visible manifestation of an ideal existence which is rapidly evaporating in his own life.

As Larry, Michael Stuhlbarg is wonderful. Like so many Coen leads – Nicholas Cage in Raising Arizona, Tim Robbins in The Hudsucker Proxy or William H. Macy in Fargo, Stuhlbarg is playing a man out of his depth. This time the depths are more philosophical than circumstantial and Stuhlbarg, a theatre actor who looks like a character out of a 1920’s movie, does mounting intellectual despair in an ironically amusing, breast-beating way that Woody Allen would relish. If Stuhlbarg was a great find, the rest of the cast are equally good. Fred Melamed stands out as Larry’s solicitous.cuckold, but across the board the casting accounts for another third of the pleasure to be had from this film.

The completing third comes from the Coen’s script. As usual with the Brothers C, it is marked by wonderful characters, inventive plotting and zesty dialogue, aspects which give it strong comedic value but there’s also an empathetic pathos and understated intellectual maturity that keeps one emotionally and mentally engaged.

There is one aspect to the film that is going to create debate and that is the film’s ending as a tornado approaches. Audiences like resolution and A Serious Man does not give it. Is it a signifier of Nature's indifference to the human comedy or a symbol of apocalyptic destruction to be wrought upon the godless.

A second question that will arise is how this strangely oblique ending relates to the film’s enigmatic preface, a seemingly autonomous story about a 19th century Polish couple and a dybbuk, if indeed it relates at all. These irregularities appear to be intentional, so one day the Coens may let us into the secret but for now they seem happy to let us wonder.

Whatever the responses to these questions are, for anyone who likes their comedy black, A Serious Man will be a most enjoyable companion.

 

 

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