A SERIOUS MAN (Film Review, Trailer)

Written by Greg VictorcloseAuthor: Greg Victor Name: Greg Victor
Email: Greg@parcbench.com
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About: Greg Victor (Parcbench Culture Editor) is a historian, pop culture critic, and theatrical dramaturg and has stage managed theatrical productions on Broadway and on tour, including Billy Joel's "Movin' Out", Monty Python's "Spamalot" and more.See Authors Posts (96) on November 10, 2009

* * ½ (out of 4)
Rating: R (profanity, brief nudity, brief violence)
Director: Joel and Ethan Coen

In “A Serious Man,” the writing-directing brother team of Joel and Ethan Coen make their most personal film yet. The film is set in suburban Minneapolis in 1967, and although it is a memory film about a very serious time in their lives, the brothers add almost enough comedy to keep it entertaining. Almost.

The “Serious Man” in the title is Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), and his life takes on its own version of the endless stresses of the much-put-upon and tested Job. Through the Coen brothers very certain direction (and some brilliant editing) we learn that the best response to the emotional tests that God (or life) put us through, is laughter.

Giving a very sympathetic performance, Michael Stuhlbarg plays a university professor up for tenure, married with two children and trying hardest to live a meaningful life. He is also unprepared when his life begins to slowly collapse: his wife tells him she is leaving him, the university tenure committee drops hints that he may not receive tenure, and on top of everything else he keeps getting phone calls from the Columbia record club demanding payment for records he did not order. His pot-smoking son signed up for the record club, but both he and his sister are too self-involved to help their father through this moment of crisis. His visiting brother Arthur (Richard Kind) proves to be even more of a walking disaster than Larry is.

As the trials of life intensify biblically, Larry looks for answers from a divorce attorney (Adam Arkin) and three rabbis. He eventually finds out that it is never easy to figure out what God is trying to tell us. The only thing that our protagonist becomes sure of is the Uncertainty Principle.

It is an intensely Jewish film that manages to convey universal themes successfully. But even though it is a good film, it is not really gripping in any way. The film is a blur of serious and comic, but sometimes the blur takes over. It is full of murky storytelling and is too slowly-paced to captivate any viewer who is not a Coen Brothers fanatic. The parable that starts the film, about a man who may or may not be a dybbuk (set in Eastern Europe and spoken in Yiddish), works so well that high expectations have been set that the Coen Brothers never quite live up to for the remainder of the film.

In the end, the film credit’s final line reads “No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture.” In fact, anyone who has been battered by life will commiserate with the story of Larry Gopnik. If you like to re-read the book of Job when you need a good laugh, this is the film for you. But the film will really only please that slice of the filmgoing audience that loves to take their comedy very seriously.