Pretentious Movie Alert: A Serious Man

Hey, Blogulator readers! Did you know that our blog is based in Minnesota? And were you aware that the Minnesota Twins won the AL Central Division in 2009?(*) And, were you aware that Academy Award-winning writer-director brother duo Joel Coen and Ethan Coen grew up in Minnesota? It's true. Snarkiness aside, new Coen Brothers' film A Serious Man opened last weekend in New York, Los Angeles, and...Minneapolis! Members of the Blogulator contingent (Chris, Brigitte and I) attended a screening.

(*)I hereby have erased the Twins being swept out of the first round of the playoffs from my memory and instead will remember the time the Twins won the division in the one-game playoff in 2009...and then the season ended happily ever after. It's just better that way.

Man is, on the surface, about a man who is has some crappy luck. His wife is leaving him for his best friend, his son is distant, his daughter wants money for a nose job, his brother is a mooch and a screw-up who drains his cysts in his bathroom, his neighbors are gun-toting deer hunters, a student simultaneously bribes and blackmails him, and his tenure track is in constant danger at work. With all of these things going on in his life, he starts to try to make sense of them by going to visit his rabbi, who is not terribly helpful in helping him answer these quandries of life. All of this is set to the backdrop of an opening vignette in which a man who may or may not be a ghost is banished from a couple's home.

In anybody elses hands, this would probably be played with heavy-handed symbolism, hammering out the existential truths of our day-to-day lives in a dull, droll manner. Of course, these are the Coen Bros, who wrote the original screenplay and directed as well, we're talking about. They made Fargo, an intermittently gruesome thriller into a combo-thriller-comedy-romance, all completely convincing and effective and, of course, one of my favorite movies, and one of the funniest movies ever, but with a sweet heart, except for the point-blank gunshots to the head and what have you. A Serious Man, then, is in the vein of Fargo, uproariously hilarious and jarring at the same time. Michael Stuhlbarg as main character Larry Gopnik has dark, violent dreams, usually questioning God's existence, but other times just plain jarring, throughout the film. He tries to hold everything together but the deck is non-stop stacked against him, and in almost exclusively hilarious fashion. A running gag throughout the film is a man representing the board that decides on tenure taking a very long time to get to the point of whether or not he is looking like he will be getting tenure(**).

(**)Maybe this was only hilarious to me because of its obvious "hey, this movie is based in Minnesota, and nobody in Minnesota knows how to be honest and direct in conversation because they're passive-aggressive wimps." Or maybe I'm just reading too much into it.

But in many ways, this is the Coen Bros most profound. Although the film kinda rambles on for a long time with scene after scene of Gopnik being humiliated, seemingly without any kind of message, the closing 10 minutes are like a hammer against your skull (or, if we're talking Fargo, an arm into a wood-chipper). I won't spoil anything, but suffice to say you will be initially weirded out, then creeped out, then sad, then reeling in what a brilliant conclusion they brought to us. It's heavy stuff for a film that's in some ways non-stop awkward comedy (but then, maybe it's not.)

The question, then, that is raised is this: do the Coen Bros believe that God exists? Is this film their definitive statement that religion is pointless? These are points that I believe are meant to be debated upon watching this. My view: I don't see it as an anti-church, anti-God scribe, but rather a wicked assessment that we as humans have no control over anything that happens in our life. The way that this idea is subtly carried through in such an entertaining film is a revelation and, quite possibly, Qualler's film of the year.

This entry was posted by Unknown, on Monday, October 12, 2009. You can leave your response.