The common Coen brothers scenario of good peoples’ lives ruined by bad choices is flipped in A Serious Man. Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a good person whose trauma is that he makes no new choices. The metaphor is made plain: As a math professor, Larry insists that equations must provide certainty. A Simple Man delves into the mystery of bad luck. But the movie’s bleakness lacks the pop fizzle and moral overview that made No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading so thrilling. Establishing Jewish faith and family in experienced, though near-vaudevillian caricatures, the last half has Larry visit three rabbis, testing his belief against his cosmic disappointment. The filmmakers accentuate repetition over story (the colleague who tells Larry his tenure is under review, the Korean kid who wants his grade changed, the Columbia House representative that won’t stop phoning). That’s a brave approach, but the film winds up presenting mundane existence in mundane term—the Coens keep us outside looking in. Larry’s spiritual crisis doesn’t attain its demanded empathy, leaving A Serious Man as a lesser work by great artists.
This article appears in Oct 22-28, 2009.
Firstly, the Coen brothers can roll up their shirt sleeves, dig a deep hole and jump in it. I don’t think this film was so much an examination in what can go wrong or right in a simple man’s life; rather, I think it’s a cinematic exercise by a secret group of ten or more first-year film students working on a studio class. There doesn’t seem to be any cohesion, just pretty pictures. And the acting—the actors, other than the lead, his wife and his brother, all seem to be drawn from the student body—the children seem more like furniture than actors, and every time they talked, they managed to escape the realm of a common couch or ottoman, and drift into the realm of… uh…what was I talking about? The film goes on and on in long, complex, unbearably cryptic scenes, while we wonder all along how the lead got into the situation in the first place.
And what the hell—seriously—what the f*cking hell does that bullshit at the beginning have to do with anything? Ghost rabbi? Dead rabbi? Kill a ghost? Oops? Now he’s not a ghost? Or is he a double ghost? WOW! OK, then realize that the rabbi story doesn’t tie into the rest of the movie at all, and just jump into an interior shot of the red-headed kid’s ear canal.
Cohen asshats, I need my ten dollars back. I need it to pay my phone bill so I can still warn people not to bother seeing this stupid fucking movie.