A Serious Man Hard to Watch

It wasn't that it was boring, but there wasn't a single character who I would like to know or be around.  They were all seriously annoying in one way or another.  Was it a good movie?  My first reaction is no, but I'm willing to pull back and consider that there was more; that I just didn't get it.

[I don't think what I write here will give anything away, but if you're planning to see the movie and want to go in with fresh eyes, stop now.]

As we talked about it over dinner afterwards, some basic themes emerged.  Perhaps the key  theme is the basic theme of this blog - What Do I Know?  What can I know?  How certain can I be?  A sub theme is about how one can find truth - science and spirituality (religion) are the main contenders.  Or maybe nothing means anything. 

For example, we have the physicist giving his students truth in a wall covering formula that none of them understand - and it's not an accident that what the Professor Larry Gopnik is proving is the uncertainty principle.  The discussion with Clive, a student who has failed the physics exam and requests a passing grade or to take it over because he didn't know there would be math on the test, also reflects the theme of how do we know what's truth.  The student says the math is hard, but he understands the dead cat (Schrödinger's Cat):

LARRY (SURPRISED) You understand the dead cat? 19 CLIVE nods gravely. But... you... you can't really understand the physics without understanding the math. The math tells how it really works. That's the real thing; the stories I give you in class are just illustrative; they're like, fables, say, to help give you a picture. An imperfect model. I mean-even I don't understand the dead cat. The math is how it really works. CLIVE shakes his head, dubious.[script from IMSDB]

But while Larry 'knows' the reality through math, it doesn't seem to translate into truths about his career or his family.   He seeks other truths from three rabbis, who tell him stories.  But when it comes to stories, Larry is just as clueless as his students are about his formulas. 

The truth theme begins the movie in the opening Yiddish tale in a Polish shtetl near Lublin, as a man comes home to tell his wife he was helped by someone she knows.  Not possible says the wife, he's dead.  So when he shows up at the house the man and wife debate if he is truly Traitle Groshkover or if he is a dybbuk. 

We transform from shtetl life into a 1967 Hebrew school class through an earpiece (they weren't called earbuds back then.)  The wife has stabbed the dybbuk (or was it Traitle Groshkover?) with an ice pick. The dybbuk or mortally wounded Traitle stands up and walks out.  From the script again:

WIFE
Nonsense, Velvel...
She walks to the door...
Blessed is the Lord. Good riddance to evil and shuts it against
the wind.

BLACK
A drumbeat thumps in the black.
Music blares: the Jefferson Airplane. Grace Slick's voice enters:
When the truth is found to be lies
And all the hope inside you dies
Don't you want somebody to love. . .


An image fades in slowly, but even up full it is dim: some kind
of round, dull white shape
with a small black pinhole center. This white half-globe is a
plug set in a flesh-toned
field. The flesh tone glows translucently, backlit. We are drifting
toward the white plug
and, as we do so, the music grows louder still.

AN EARPIECE

A pull back-a reverse on the preceding push in-from the cheap
white plastic earpiece
of a transistor radio. The Jefferson Airplane continues over
the cut but becomes
extremely compressed. The pull back reveals that the earpiece
is lodged in someone's
ear and trails a white cord.

We drift down the cord to find the radio at its other end. As
we do so we hear, live in the
room, many voices speaking a foreign language in unison.

[An aside:  I don't recall white ear pieces back then.  I'm pretty sure they were all black.  And this was a transistor radio, not an iPod or even a Walkman, where it would make sense that the rabbi would later hear the same song that Danny was listening to.  Perhaps the white cords were to fool us into believing that it had Danny's songs saved instead of being a radio that would play different songs.  This is not a big deal, artistic license and all.  Just a note.]

Throughout the movie, all the things Larry knows - his marriage, his brother, his job - turn out to be not what he thought they were.  

Grace Slick's words come back near the movie's end, on the lips of the elderly rabbi:

When the truth is found to be lies
And all the hope inside you dies


Another important theme - "I haven't done anything" - comes over the phone from Dick Dutton of the Columbia Record Club.  I'd forgotten about record clubs.  The ads in magazines and in the mail offered you a bunch of free records (the kind you play music on), but the catch is that you have to then buy one each month for X months, and then they keep coming UNLESS you tell them to stop.  That scheme has migrated even more effectively to the internet.  

VOICE Okay, well, you received your twelve introductory albums and you have been receiving the monthly main selection for four months now- LARRY "The monthly main selection?" Is that a record? I didn't ask for any records. VOICE To receive the monthly main selection you do nothing. LARRY That's right! I haven't done anything! [emphasis added] VOICE Yes, that's why you receive the monthly main selection.

Through much of the movie, Larry doesn't do anything.  His wife wants a divorce and tells him to see a lawyer.  He does nothing. Finally, when it's too late, he sees the lawyer.  Clive (the failing grad student) leaves an envelope full of money, but Larry doesn't do anything - doesn't report the money or the student, doesn't change the grade, just lets things slide until the very end.  He's up for tenure, but he hasn't published any articles.  His tenure committee chair, Arlen Finkle stops by to see if there is anything Larry wants to add to his tenure file:

Arlen Finkle Well. Anything. Published work. Anything else you've done outside of the institution. Any work that we might not be aware of. LARRY I haven't done anything. [emphasis added] Arlen Finkle Uh-huh. LARRY I haven't published.


Is fate vs. free will another theme here?  Maybe, but I'm not sure.  There's a number of mentions of Hashem.   Though mostly these don't really imply fate.  Rabbi Scott does say, about all the things happening to Larry:

You have to see these things as expressions of God's will.
You don't have to like it, of course.

Or is this the curse of the Dybbuk stabbed by some foremother of Larry in the shtetl?  

I'm sure there's lots more than this.   There are the obvious similarities to Job for example.  But is this bringing together of diverse references what it takes to make a good movie?  Or is this cinematic trivial pursuit in dark heavy tones disguised by first rate technical work and acting?  Why is this world so relentlessly joyless?  While Larry, who can't seem to do anything, is painfully helpless, the other characters each have their own distastefulness.  There's his wife who's leaving him.   There's his failing student.  The rabbis who can't or won't help Larry.  His weird brother who is oblivious to anyone else's needs.  His daughter who's always nagging.  His son who's an unlovable 12 year old pot head.  Or are these people this way because Larry 'doesn't do anything'?  Or are we seeing them through Larry's eyes? 

The world they depicted is not a world I know.  Not a world I would want to live in.  Most writers and film makers write about their own worlds.  What sort of depressing childhood did the Coen brothers have to lead them to the series of films they've offered?  They aren't simply eccentric, they're dark, morose, violent.  They highlight the worst features of human beings.  There are dark films that show people living difficult lives that I've thought were terrific.  But they reflect a truth about humans, and insight into humanity, that I just don't see in this movie.  While the Coen brothers may work with the most classic of human themes, I don't see that they bring any enlightenment.  Using Shakespeare's themes, doesn't make one a bard.  I just don't think they have the wisdom to make profound films.  They're still children playing at grownup.  They can make films like Professor Gropnik can write formulas.  Their technical skill is impressive, but their understanding of humanity is not nearly as developed.  This was not my cup of tea.  

OK, that's my take.  Now I can go look at what others have said.

Jerry Traverse at Rolling Stone begins:

The Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, are getting personal. They shot their new film in suburban Minnesota, where they grew up as sons of Jewish academics. But if you're expecting something warm and fuzzy, circa 1967, you don't know the Coens, and A Serious Man is no country for you. This seriously funny movie, artfully photographed by the great Roger Deakins, is spiritual in nature, barbed in tone, and, oh, yeah, it stings like hell.

A.O. Scott writing at the New York Times seems to have liked it (It's a NYTimes Critic's Choice.)  Here's a snippet of his review:

. . .So a question put before the congregation by “A Serious Man” is whether it makes the case for atheism or looks at the world from a divine point of view. Are the Coens mocking God, playing God or taking his side in a rigged cosmic game? What’s the difference?
The philosophical conundrums in “A Serious Man” can be posed only in jest — or, at least, in the cultural tradition of Ashkenazic Judaism that stretches from the shtetls of Poland to the comedy clubs of the Catskills, that is how they tend to be posed. But a deep anxiety lurks beneath the jokes, and though “A Serious Man” is written and structured like a farce, it is shot (by Roger Deakins), scored (by Carter Burwell) and edited (by the Coens’ pseudonymous golem Roderick Jaynes) like a horror movie.

I wouldn't go as far as Goatdog, who truly didn't like it:

A Serious Man is a truly despicable film, and I I [sic] ordinarily count myself among the Coen brothers' fans and/or defenders. So I was astonished that with this film, in one fell stroke, they had me believing that everything their detractors say might just be right: they may be talented yet juvenile creeps, the cinematic equivalent of a 13-year-old supreme being who delights in putting his little Job through unbearable torment, only to reward him with a painful death. In 90 minutes, they shook my faith in twenty years of films. Suddenly the Coens are the Federico Fellinis of burning ants to death with a magnifying glass.

 Michael W. Phillips Jr.'s (Goatboy) "talented yet juvenile" says much more clearly what I think is wrong with this film.