A Serious Man (2009) – Joel and Ethan Coen (Friday’s Finest)

The brothers Joel and Ethan Coen have long stood among my favourite filmmakers, and their work has often featured here at Friday’s Finest. A Serious Man (2009) seems one of their lesser-known and most underrated films, yet I think it deserves greater recognition within film circles. I rewatched it recently after a long hiatus, and with a few more years under my middle-aged belt, I found it even more engaging – funny, tragic, and mystifying all at once.

Larry Gopnik, a Midwestern physics teacher, watches his life unravel over multiple sudden incidents. Despite seeking meaning and answers amidst his turmoils, he seems to keep sinking.

The film’s modus operandi follows a similar pattern to the Coens’ later Inside Llewyn Davis (2013): both feature a protagonist who bears a heavy cross, bewildered by the world’s indifference. As Ethan Coen once remarked, “It’s more interesting for me as an audience member to see a movie about a loser.” Allow me to digress – the antecedent link to my review of Llewyn Davis contains one of my first-ever posts on my blog, which, for anyone interested, details my hypothesis about the significance of the cats in the film, as well as the “record analogy” relating to its sequencing and storytelling.

Unlike Llewyn, which is a stark and humourless trudge through ankle-deep snow – and viewers of the film will appreciate that analogy – A Serious Man is a black comedy, one where I found myself chuckling at the most unexpected scenes (often, mind you), which I suppose is the aim of such a genre. However, the directors craftily balance the film like a tightrope walker on a high wire, between this futility-tinged comedy and its equally contemplative drama about Jewish life in the soulless Minnesotan suburbs of 1960s North America.

IMDB Storyline (includes Spoilers):

Bloomington, Minnesota, 1967: Jewish physics lecturer Larry Gopnik is a serious and a very put-upon man. His daughter is stealing from him to save up for a nose job; his pot-head son, who gets stoned at his own bar-mitzvah, only wants him round to fix the TV aerial and his useless brother Arthur is an unwelcome houseguest. But both Arthur and Larry get turfed out to a motel when Larry’s wife Judy, who wants a divorce, moves her lover Sy into the house and even after Sy’s death in a car crash they are still there. With lawyers’ bills mounting for his divorce, Arthur’s criminal court appearances, and a land feud with a neighbor, Larry is tempted to take the bribe offered by a student to give him an illegal exam pass mark. And the rabbis he visits for advice only dole out platitudes. Still God moves in mysterious–and not always pleasant–ways, as Larry and his family will find out.

The Coens themselves stated that the “germ” of the story was a rabbi from their adolescence: a “mysterious figure” who had a private conversation with each student at the conclusion of their religious education.Ethan Coen said that it seemed appropriate to open the film with a Yiddish folk tale, but as the brothers did not know any suitable ones, they wrote their own.

I’ve always been fascinated by the Jewish perception of life and its reflection in art and culture – whether in the music of Dylan and Cohen, the comedy of Seinfeld and Larry David, or the cinema of Woody Allen and the Coens. There’s something profoundly prophetic, even therapeutic, about the way Jewish thinkers turn suffering and doubt into art. I consider myself an agnostic Judeo-Christian of sorts – drawn to the metaphorical power of biblical archetypes, the divinity and sanctity of the individual through the “Logos,” and the idea of living as if God exists.

So if I wander off on tangents while writing this, it’s only fitting. After all, A Serious Man itself is about wandering through uncertainty – about our endless search for meaning in the inexplicable patterns of existence. Religion, in the Coens’ telling, offers little consolation. The rabbis’ platitudes sound hollow, their authority fragile. Yet this cynicism isn’t nihilistic; it’s human. Like the Book of Job, it asks: why do bad things happen to good people? And like Job, Larry receives no answer- only more mystery.

From the small towns of the old world to the quiet streets of suburbia, the hidden powers that shape our existence remain unfathomable. We like to think we grasp certain principles and attempt to live in harmony with them, yet often we’re simply deluding ourselves. Sooner or later – as the “serious man” learns the hard way — life strikes back, and without mercy. A demon might knock on your door, an accident could cut your story short, a sudden illness might appear, or a storm could rip everything away. There are rules governing such events, but they lie far beyond our reach – and the troubles we obsess over in the meantime are, in truth, trivial.

So therein lies the positive light I could muster from the film: that life and its significance can, to a large degree, be discerned through our individual senses – by how we govern our perception of what happens to us. The Coens suggest that even amid absurdity, grace is possible – not as divine intervention, but as a shift in consciousness. While we cannot control the universe, we can control our stance toward it.

References:
1. A Serious Man – Wikipedia
2. A Serious Man – IMDB

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“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand