Watching "A Serious Man"
1- A Serious Man is a serious allegory with the underlying meaning being that...nothing has meaning.
The films opens with a reenactment of a Yiddish fable, in which a married couple is confronted with a dybbuk, a spirit of a local villager. The rational husband refuses to believe that the old man standing before him is a spirit, while the seriously superstitious wife stabs the old man with an ice pick to prove to her husband that he's a ghost. The old man laughs, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he has an icepick in his chest, but the mood changes as blood appears on the old man's clothing. The old man stumbles back out into the cold snowy landscape, and disappears, leaving the audience feeling uneasy and confused. Was he alive or was he a dybbuk? Like most things Jewish, the end is inconclusive: a perfect introduction for the parable that follows. Similar to Goldilocks in the children's fairy tale, the film's protagonist Larry Gopnik visits three different rabbis looking for answers. But unlike in the Goldilocks story, the rabbis all fail to answer his questions. As unfortunate events pile up Larry's quest for meaning grows increasingly frantic. By the end, some of the events have reached conclusions, while others remain ambiguous. In the final scene, a hurricane sweeps into town, but the screen cuts to black before the results are known. So what's the moral of this story? Like the story of the dybbuk, it's indeterminate. Larry's struggle is representative of man's general struggle against the chaotic forces of the universe and the hapless search--through religion, science, mysticism, what have you---for meaning in the chaos.
2-A Serious Man is a comedy dressed as a horror movie.
Coen humor always centers around the quotidian lives of its grotesque characters. In A Serious Man, this comedy becomes a serious, anxiety-ridden affair. The Coen Bros imbue the gestures of each character with enormous portent, from the son's fingers drumming as he listens to music to Larry's hands fiddling with the antenna on his roof. Every movement seems so deliberate and well thought out, increasing the tension with the skill and grace of a well-timed anxiety attack and leaving the audience on the edge of its seat, hands to chest in suspense. But every time, this pent-up anxiety is for naught. Just like Larry, the audience is fooled into thinking that the film's style will lead to substance--an attack, a surprise. But these ultra-controlled movements, accentuated by the film's eerie and mysterious 4-note theme only lead to a big question mark. And the audience, who have been waiting for answers to their anxiety and fear-laden questions--Will the son’s Walkman be discovered? What will the Larry's ear-test results be? Who was trying to sabotage his tenure hearings? Will his brother get caught?--are left in the dark. The mysteries of the universe are unknowable and uncontrollable, and the unfortunate series of events that causes Larry to try to uncover them is quintessential Coen humor.
What do you think? Do you agree that the film is this cynical? I'd be interested to hear how people felt that religion and general jewishness was portrayed--endearingly, knowingly, derisively, etc. Comments, critiques welcome!
Labels: A Serious Man, Cohen Brothers, comedy, film, Focus Features, Horror
posted by FilmFlam at
2:25 PM
3 Comments:
A high school classmate of my fathers sent him this. I think he's being charitable in general, and dead wrong when he refers to the "standards out there to which Judaism correctly directs us". That said, I do think he's right when it comes to the aspect of chaos you've identified, which is that the movie suggests we can at best be humble in face of it. This at Jewish theme, though perhaps not uniquely so.
"The film begins with a shtetl scene with involved an incident that may or
may not have had a window onto the supernatural. The couple had to decide,
and a wrong choice by the couple would be disastrous. It was like a
miniature Greek tragedy, in which all the character’s choices are wrong.
This story had no direct relation to the main plot, which was about the
falling apart of a Jewish physics professor in 1960’s Minneapolis. The
critics have portrayed all the other characters as grotesque; I saw them as
a caricature of normal people trapped in their humanity. To me, they all
seemed portrayed relatively sympathetically.
The physics professor looks for meaning in the various catastrophes. It
isn’t in physics, where he shows that the seeming truths of the equations
lead to Schrödinger’s paradox and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. He
consults with rabbis who say, basically, that God is there, he probably
wants something from us, shows us signs that point us in the right
directions, but doesn’t give us the answers. In the mean time, there’s no
harm in being good. The younger of the rabbis is inarticulate. The older
(and none of the critics picked up on this) says that he knows only that he
doesn’t know anything, that there is a moral order, and that it doesn’t hurt
to be good. This sounds like what Socrates said in Plato’s dialogs.
Wisdom is portrayed as humility in the face of a complicated order, coupled
with a willingness to search. Glimpses at truth can be found in strange
places—in looking at a parking lot, in the scribbling of an insane man, or
in rock lyrics.
Toward the end of the movie the physicist is forced to make a moral choice.
Like the choice in the prologue, the consequences are momentous, but both
choices are wrong, and the better choice isn’t clear. The physicist chooses.
Immediately (within seconds) after he chooses, two physical catastrophes
loom (the earlier ones were social catastrophes) but, as the movie ends, we
don’t know if they transpire.
The philosophical slant is that there is good and bad in all of us, that
nothing will feed us the right answers, but that there are standards out
there to which Judaism correctly directs us. This is a film by and for Jews.
There is a lot of unexplained reference to Jewish cultural and religious
concepts and shared experience. If you aren’t Jewish or very familiar with
practitioners of the Jewish religion, you aren’t likely to get it. This is
why almost all the critics got it so totally wrong.
This movie has to be a must for anyone Jewish. If you’re not, I’m not
telling you not to see it."
That's an interesting piece. I'm not sure I agree with the author's thoughts on wisdom. I think the film portrays wisdom as being at peace with the unknowable, per the film's opening quote: "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you." I think the Coen's see the quest as fruitless and those in the film in the midst of it--Larry Gropnik, the young rabbi, the brother--as silly. However, I agree that the characters are portrayed relatively sympathetically. I mean let's be honest, at the end of the day aren't we all just looking for some answers?
I LIKED IT.
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