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’.