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Friday April 9, 2010
Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, starring Michael Stuhlbarg, Sari Lennick, Fred Melamed
A sometimes savage satire on the Jewish communities of the Coen brothers’ own upbringing, A Serious Man is a sublimely funny but very serious film about a bleak subject. Stuhlbarg is Larry Gopnik, a Midwestern professor of theoretical physics whose life is unravelling. His wife announces that their marriage is over and she wants a divorce. His increasingly unstable brother is camped on his sofa endlessly scribbling his own arcane mathematical thesis and dealing with some sort of unspeakable cyst. On the verge of securing long awaited academic tenure, anonymous letters are reaching his superiors on campus, slandering his professional practice. He is being bribed by an ambitious and unscrupulous student. His children are utterly adrift from him and their Jewish cultural values, pursuing instead an agenda of marijuana, TV and plastic surgery. Meanwhile, life beyond his enclosed Jewish community is morally and spiritually desolate, characterised by red necked bigotry and a dangerously seductive hedonism that Larry finds both repellent and fascinating. As life spirals further away from his grasp, Larry experiences an epiphany, a realisation that he needs to urgently reconnect with his faith and to re-ground himself in enduring truths. But in seeking consolation in the wisdom of the rabbis, he gets little other than vacuous and facile platitude. A Serious Man is about existential crisis, about coming to the realisation that we are each utterly alone and that control of one’s life is an arrogant fantasy. But hey, don’t let a little thing like that put you off. It is also hypnotic and mesmerising, visually sumptuous, periodically hilarious, strangely profound and quite unlike any other film you are likely to see for a while.
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