Old Yorker

  • A Serious Man

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Joel and Ethan Coen (2009)

    When I watch a Coen brothers picture in the presence of others, I feel as if I’m watching a foreign language film and the only person in the audience who needs subtitles.  The possibility of my face cracking during A Serious Man soon became almost absorbingly remote yet most of the (smallish) audience in the Odeon was chuckling often and contentedly at the dolorous story of the title character Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg).  Larry is in his mid- to late thirties; married with two teenage kids, he’s a science lecturer in a Minnesota college.  Larry is on the brink of tenure.  His pot-smoking son Danny (Aaron Wolff) is about to have his bar-mitzvah.  The main aim in life of his daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) seems to be to have cosmetic surgery.   The domestic atmosphere is strained – between this brother and sister and especially thanks to the presence of Larry’s brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), who’s long outstayed his welcome as a house guest.  It’s possible that Arthur is a hypochondriac about physical ailments but there’s no doubt that his mental health is fragile:  when he’s not spending hours in the bathroom draining a ‘sebaceous cyst‘, he’s filling notebooks with an abstruse treatise, much of it written in dense patterns and symbols and something to do with neurology.  Larry’s life quickly starts to unravel. His wife Judith (Sari Wagner Lennick) wants a divorce and it’s her mentor Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), a longstanding family friend and a recent widower, whom she wants to leave her husband for.  A work colleague (Michael Tezla) explains that the tenure committee has received anonymous and defamatory letters about Larry.  He’s bribed by a Chinese student (David Kang) who’s disappointed by his maths grades.  Both Larry’s kids, in their different ways, are fleecing their father.  Arthur gets in trouble with the police.  Larry turns for help to a succession of three rabbis (Simon Helberg, George Wyner, Alan Mandell).

    A Serious Man has been described (not by the Coens themselves, as far as I know) as a modern retelling of the Book of Job.   Bad things happen to Larry and the trio of rabbis corresponds to Job’s comforters.  The resemblances between the characters and stories don’t go much further than that.  (It’s surprising, given the Coens’ predilection for the physically rebarbative, that they didn’t find an equivalent of the Biblical episode when Satan ‘smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto his crown’.   Arthur’s sebaceous cyst seems a rather poor substitute.)  Job was a man ‘perfect and upright, and one that feared God and eschewed evil’.   Larry ticks the last box but not so obviously any of the other three.  The Gopniks may observe the cultural ritual of bar-mitzvah but Larry isn’t a spiritual man who thinks that a heavenly father is looking after him.  In other words, A Serious Man is about being a Jew rather than a religious believer and it seems to present Jews rather than the God-fearing as essentially ridiculous.

    The film’s prologue, set in a shtetl in Tsarist Russia and with Yiddish dialogue (which did have subtitles), involves a couple’s encounter with a dybbuk[1] (Fyvush Finkel) – an encounter which the wife (Yelena Shmulenson) tells her husband (Allen Lewis Rickman) will inevitably bring bad luck.  I struggled to understand the meaning of this sequence.   Are the Coens deriding the superstition or saying that the bad luck skipped a couple of generations before visiting Larry or that the intervening holocaust was even worse luck for Jews?   Maybe it doesn’t matter; maybe it’s enough, for them, to create this striking, eerie sequence and leave the audience with the impression that the people we’ve just seen are hapless and ludicrous and, in that respect, anticipate the ones we’re going to see in the 1960s story that follows.  (But, if so, why bother?)  The Coen brothers were born and raised in Minnesota by academic parents and the film takes place in 1967, the year that Joel Coen reached bar-mitzvah age (Ethan is three years younger).   A Serious Man is therefore being seen as a first for the Coens – a return to their roots, although they’re too disdainfully detached for roots to seem the right word.  They seem fascinated by the suburban geography of the place (as usual, their expert team includes Roger Deakins as cinematographer and Jess Gonchor as production designer, and the writer-directors are also the film’s editors).  They may well like the music of the era too and the Jefferson Airplane song ‘Somebody To Love’ supplies vibrant punctuation to the story (with incidental music by another Coens regular, Carter Burwell).  But the brothers are predictably derisive about the human beings in the world in which they grew up.

    No one could accuse the Coens of peopling their films with the physically unremarkable.    The faces and/or bodies on display are either remarkably ugly or exceptionally pleasing; occasionally an average-looking actor playing a simple-minded character is encouraged to perform in a way that makes them look crudely stupid.  (The trio of protagonists in O Brother, Where Art Thou? illustrate the three categories.)  The brothers often have Roger Deakins photograph the performers concerned in close-ups to emphasise their unfortunate looks.   If the Coens suggested a fascination with physical grossness and awkwardness that would be one thing; if they equated a hideous appearance with viciousness, that would be problematic but, if expressed seriously, provocative; as it is, they just seem to be making fun of people who are fat or bulbous-featured or otherwise displeasing to the eye.  The audience at A Serious Man got plenty of laughs from the facially or corporeally ill-favoured people up on the screen and that seems a reasonable reaction given the way the Coens present them.  A Gentile director couldn’t of course have got away with making A Serious Man because the facial characteristics on which the brothers concentrate in this way are emphatically Jewish ones.  The cast of A Serious Man can obviously act but the performances tend to be too deliberate, as if the actors are aware the Coens want their characterisations to be anchored in their looks – and want to take plenty of time examining the imperfection of those looks.   It’s surely no coincidence that the rhythm of the monologue delivered by the second rabbi, whose looks are unexceptional and even pleasant, is freer than most of the rest of the film.

    Woody Allen, in the days when he used to straddle the departments of Jewish social satire and existential angst, created a much more enjoyable combination than the Coens.  They write clever dialogue but its cleverness is self-satisfied:  they’re dependent on the actors in their films not just to bring their wit to life but to stop it being alienating (as George Clooney, Richard Jenkins and Tilda Swinton succeeded in doing in Burn After Reading).   Woody Allen’s casting himself made a huge difference in making clear that he, along with other members of his ethnic group, was the butt of his jokes.  A Serious Man made me nostalgic for Allen not just because of the Coens’ lack of sympathy with their satirical targets but because they don’t seem preoccupied either with the unfairness of an apparently godless universe in the way Allen so garrulously used to be.  In fact the Coens here are at a double remove from this kind of anguish because Larry Gopnik himself doesn’t seem oppressed by the implications of his worsening fortunes.   Yet critics enthusiastic about A Serious Man rave about how ‘dark’ and ‘disturbing’ and ‘mature’ (as well as ‘laugh out loud’) it is – in a way I don’t recall happening for Woody Allen except when he made a self-consciously solemn picture like Interiors or Crimes and Misdemeanors.  Compared with the briskly entertaining Burn After Reading, A Serious Man moves more slowly and the tone is often lugubrious.  It may be for these spurious reasons that people think the film has depth.

    When the Coen brothers won the Best Director Oscar for No Country For Old Men Joel Coen concluded their acceptance speech with the following:

    ‘Ethan and I have been making stories with movie cameras since we were kids. … And honestly, what we do now doesn’t feel that much different from what we were doing then … we’re very thankful to all of you out there for letting us continue to play in our corner of the sandbox, so thank you very much.’

    This strikes me as honest.  The Coens are still two unassailably smart school kids, laughing at their more naïve contemporaries – like Enid and Becky at the start (but not by the end) of Ghost World.  Maybe I wouldn’t hate the brothers’ pictures as much if their many admirers saw them in this light too, and not as intellectually serious film-makers.  Or maybe that wouldn’t make a difference and I’d still loathe the films as smugly nasty and jocose.  When we first meet Larry Gopnik he’s having a medical examination and seems to get a clean bill of health.  Towards the end of the film, when things otherwise start looking up for him, he’s called back by the doctor, as an apocalyptic-looking tornado approaches the town.  I’m prejudiced and primed to dislike the Coens’ films – having seen the trailer for A Serious Man several times I wasn’t expecting it to change my mind about them. But I do think it’s their most dislikeable picture in some time – partly for what it is, partly, I think, because it’s been well received and that makes you feel more helpless arguing against it.  It brings back Pauline Kael’s words about Barton Fink:

    ‘It seems to me a misconception at almost every level.  It’s a terrible picture.  The Coen brothers’ sense of style is so limiting too.  Very strange, arrogant conception of the past.   An appalling movie.’

    28 November 2009

    [1] The online dictionary’s definition is ‘In Jewish folklore, the wandering soul of a dead person that enters the body of a living person and controls his or her behavior’.

  • The Cut

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Fatih Akin (2014)

    This is only the second non-documentary feature made by Fatih Akin since The Edge of Heaven (2007).  In addition to the comedy Soul Kitchen (2009), Akin contributed an episode to New York, I Love You (2008), an anthology involving eleven directors, and made the documentary Polluting Paradise in 2012.  (I’ve seen none of these.)  The Edge of Heaven is a great film about people striving to overcome different kinds of estrangement – caused by fallings out, national borders, death – in order to be reunited or reconciled with family members.  In The Cut a young husband and father is separated from his wife and twin daughters in 1915:  he spends years and crosses continents trying to find his children.  Their themes may be superficially similar but Akin’s new film has little in common with The Edge of Heaven in terms of complexity and subtlety.  The Cut is a disappointment and it’s soon clear that it’s not going to work.   Much of the film is in English, even though few of its cast are native English speakers; Akin joins the distinguished list of film artists who don’t ‘hear’ so well when their actors are reading lines in a language that is not the director’s own.  But the shortcomings of The Cut go much deeper than that.

    Nazaret Manoogian is an Armenian, a blacksmith in the town of Mardin, now in Turkey but, at the outbreak of the First World War, part of the Ottoman Empire.  During the war years, the Ottoman government systematically expelled members of the minority Armenian community from their historic homeland; in what is now known as the ‘Armenian genocide’, many of the able-bodied male population were either murdered or died as army conscripts subjected to forced labour in appalling conditions.  Women and children, the elderly and the infirm were deported on ‘death marches’.  Nazaret is conscripted and, for much of the period of the Great War, labours on a work gang in the Mesopotamian desert.  Some members of the group die in the arduous conditions; others agree to renounce their Christianity and convert to Islam in exchange for the offer of freedom.  Of the remainder, Nazaret is the sole survivor of a massacre carried out by civilian prisoners on Ottoman military orders.  His companions’ throats are cut.  The man meant to kill Nazaret can’t bring himself to do so, although he does stab him in the neck and renders Nazaret mute as a result of the injury.  After further travails in the desert, during which he rails at and rejects God, Nazaret is given refuge by Omar Nasreddin, a soap merchant in Aleppo, whose premises eventually become a virtual refugee camp for displaced Armenians.  It’s here that Nazaret learns that, although his wife died on a death march, his twin daughters survived.  This is the start of his search for the girls, a search that takes him to many orphanages, then across the Atlantic – to Cuba, to Minneapolis and eventually to North Dakota.  There, in the mid-1920s, he’s reunited with one of his daughters, the other having died a few months previously.

    The London Film Festival catalogue not unexpectedly introduces The Cut as a film concerned with the Armenian genocide.  The genocide remains a highly controversial subject and an atrocity that some, not least in Turkey, continue to deny.  You don’t doubt its importance to Akin, born in Germany of Turkish parents, but The Cut, which he wrote with Mardik Martin (best known as the co-author of New York, New York and Raging Bull), is a verging-on-generic story – of a man whom war has separated from loved ones and who will give his all to find them again.  Nazaret’s travels allow Akin and his cinematographer Rainer Klausmann to create some fine images of various peopleless landscapes but these amount to no more than physical context and the particular circumstances that have caused the break-up of the family are merely background to a familiar central quest.  In the wartime part of the story, Akin shows little talent for marshalling crowds or even smaller numbers of people:  the Armenian prisoners in the desert often resemble a tableau and not a very vivant one – they give the impression of lining up for a group photograph.  What are clearly meant to be especially powerful moments, such as the apostasy of Nazaret’s fellow prisoners, are weak:  thanks not only to the standard issue expressions of disgust (‘You dogs …  you Judases … may you burn in hell!’) but also to the flat-footed staging.

    The lack of dynamism in these desert sequences – the fact that they look (poorly) choreographed and convey no sense of violent disorder, of things happening unaccountably – draws attention to the artificiality of the hero’s survival against the odds.  You accept that this is necessary, of course, but Tahar Rahim’s Nazaret, even in the work gang, always looks a man apart.  Later on, in Aleppo, Nazaret watches a screening of The Kid with a large audience of other refugees:  Nazaret laughs then cries at the separation of Chaplin and the little boy – there’s no suggestion at all that the plot of The Kid might be resonant for others in the audience.  Akin must see it as important that Nazaret loses the power of speech:  it’s possible that this is meant to be symbolic of an idea that the Armenian genocide has continued to be hushed up but it doesn’t pay dividends – except in one of the film’s few amusing moments when, in the soap works, Nazaret is asked questions by one of Omar Nasreddin’s employees and writes an answer on a tablet of soap, only to be told by this other man that he can’t read.  Tahar Rahim holds your attention but he’s an actor who thrives on interaction with others and there’s little scope for that in such a mechanical plot; nor, in spite of Nazaret’s globetrotting, is Rahim given any opportunity to do what he’s proved so good at doing in earlier films – realising a character who has to adapt to new situations and who turns them to his advantage.  Nazaret’s commitment to finding his daughters is so fundamental and unwavering that Rahim is also denied the chance to show hope building and withering and growing again.  He has a wonderful moment when Nazaret first encounters Omar Nasreddin in the desert, the merchant asks if he’s Armenian and the young man’s face reflects his dilemma:  if Nazaret nods his head, will he be seizing a chance of survival or condemning himself to death?  Otherwise, though, Rahim’s acting here isn’t in the same league as his work in A Prophet or Free Men or The Past or Grand Central. 

     The Edge of Heaven involved collisions between people (or near-misses) which, although they may have been improbable, were integral not just to the story but to the themes of the film.  You fully accepted these coincidences.   In The Cut, people reappear purely for ironic effect or in order to move the plot forward:  in the opening scene, Nazaret is congratulated by a customer on a piece of smithing work he’s done and we’re introduced to Nazaret’s apprentice.  The customer bumps into Nazaret when the latter is wandering in the desert; it’s the apprentice who turns up in Aleppo to tell Nazaret that his daughters have survived.  In Havana, the kindly barber who gives him lodging and explains that the girls have moved to Minneapolis also helps buy Nazaret passage to the US.  Good marriages to Cubans had been arranged for both daughters but one of the prospective husbands rejected his bride because of her limp (a physical disability inherited from the privations of the death march) and the other twin refused to go ahead with her own marriage and thereby leave her sister alone.  The barber’s wife points out to Nazaret the man who rejected his daughter; Nazaret beats the man up and steals from him enough money to pay his own way to Florida.  As the boat bound for there is about to leave, the barber says to him, ‘By the way, I forgot to ask – where did you get the money from?’  They then exchange a significant look and the barber says ‘May God bless you …’ as Nazaret sails away.  By this stage, Akin seems to be going through the motions and the final stages of the story lose what little credibility remains.  Nazaret, after being nearly beaten to death by a group of malignant Irish navvies, gets up and walks along a railway track into Ruso, North Dakota.  The first person he sees there, coming out of a house, is a limping woman.  It can’t be … but it is.  In his attempts to attract her attention, Nazaret even briefly recovers enough voice to make his daughter hear him call.  It’s really sad that The Cut, inspired by events which matter personally to the man who made it, becomes such an impersonal and phony piece of work but I hope Akin’s failure with this kind of ‘international’ project is enough to send him back to the sort of films with which he made his name – films which are smaller scale than The Cut only in logistical terms and infinitely richer in the things that matter.   The large cast includes Simon Abkarian, Makram Khoury, Trine Dyrholm and Lara Heller.  The ambitious, overly dominant score is by Alexander Hacke.

    12 October 2014

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