Mysterious ways

Wednesday, 18th November 2009

A Serious Man
15, Nationwide

Listen, I love a Jewish story as much as anyone, if not more so, and I even loved Neil Diamond in The Jazz Singer — only kidding; it was horrible! — but this? I am just not sure. Or, to put it another way, if I have one serious problem with the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, it is: just how seriously are we meant to take it? If it is meant to be significantly illuminating, in what way are we significantly illuminated? And, if it isn’t, then what are we being invited to laugh at? Jews? Judaism? Faith in general? Fat ladies? Family? Life in the ’burbs? Again? Honestly, I do wish film-makers would get over sneering at the suburbs. We can’t all live just off Wardour Street. Still, what do I know? I’m not much of a serious person myself. I am hardly Proust...only kidding! I’ve been compared to Proust many times.

The film opens with a Yiddish-language prologue set in a shtetl a century ago in Eastern Europe, in which a couple open their door to a bearded old man who may or may not be a dybbuk (a demonic spirit). Quite what this parable has to do with the rest of the film is never clear, although it may just be that: that nothing is ever clear. Next thing you know, we are in the American Midwest in the 1960s, with Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor whose life is beginning to fall apart. A Korean student (David Kang) seems set on destroying him. His wife Judith (Sari Lennick) tells him she is in love with their widowed friend, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), whom she describes as ‘a more serious man’, even though he wears a head-to-toe baby-blue ensemble to play golf. Larry’s son, Danny (Aaron Wolff), is more interested in pot than in his Bar Mitzvah studies. His daughter, Sarah (Jessica McManus), is stealing money for a nose job. Larry’s far older brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), is homeless, sleeps on the couch, does weird things that bring in the police, and has a neck abscess that requires constant draining. Eventually, Larry even has to move out of his suburban home into a seedy motel. You can tell his home is a suburban home because there are lawn disputes between neighbours and everyone slurps their soup.

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