Movie review: A Serious Man

by John P. Meyer

A Serious Man easily takes the title of "least mainstream-accessible Coen Brothers movie," and yet it's replete with those attributes that draw lovers of their quirky narrative style to cinemas. As it turns out, their surrealistic, allegorical storytelling tendencies seem perfectly suited to the film's steeped-in-Jewishness subject matter.

And things certainly start out surrealistic, with an opening sequence involving a man (Allen Lewis Rickman) returning late to his wife (Yelena Shmulenson) and hearth from the lonely Lublin road. It's dark and snowy (and long, long ago), and the man's wife wants to know what took him so long.

He launches into a tale involving an old acquaintance he met on the road, and how that gentleman stopped to help him repair the broken wheel of his cart. But when he reveals the fellow's name, his wife gasps and declares they've been cursed: because, she says, the man her husband met on the road has been dead these many years, thus making the thing her husband conversed with (and -- uh oh -- invited to dinner) a dybbuk.

Which, a Jewish friend tells me, is the key to all that follows -- even though the Coen boys have publicly declared otherwise.

Following the dybbuk sequence, we enter into a world of seeming normality focusing on the '60's-era life of a small town midwestern professor named Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg). When we first meet Larry, he's undergoing a series of medical tests in his doctor's office. These segments are intercut with glimpses of Larry's son Danny (likeable first-time actor Aaron Wolff) as he struggles to remain conscious in Hebrew class, employing a transistor radio and earphone to support the effort -- until the incensed instructor snatches them away.

After the doctor gives him a clean bill of health, Larry returns home to discover that his wife (Sari Lennick, as Judith) wants a divorce. She admits to cultivating a close acquaintanceship with neighbor Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), a widower. Meanwhile, Larry's dysfunctional brother Arthur (Richard Kind) seems to have taken up semi-permanent residence on the family sofa -- except for when he's semi-permanently residing in the family bathroom, much to the consternation of Larry's teenage daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus), who's trying to get ready for an evening at a local teen hangout called The Hole.

It doesn't help Larry's fragile emotional state when he finds that he's being bribed and/or blackmailed by a Korean student in his physics class (David Kang, as Clive): after the young man comes to his office to complain about his failing grade (in hilariously non sequitur fashion), an envelope stuffed with money appears on Larry's desk.

In the background (literally, given that she lives across the alley from his house) lurks the strangely seductive Mrs. Samsky (Amy Landecker), whose husband travels on business and who's fond of sunbathing in the nude. Larry discovers this last part (along with her parts) while messing with the roof-mounted TV antenna which has proven sadly deficient in providing young Danny with a clear view of F Troop. Mrs. Samsky has ethereal blue eyes and peculiar reptilian mannerisms that might or might not indicate she represents a demonic presence. (Equally likely: she goes around continuously stoned.)

Uncle Arthur has some kind of draining cyst on the back of his neck, and Larry is being forced out of his own house because Sy and Judith have decided it makes the most sense (given the circumstances). In desperation, Larry seeks the counsel of a series of progressively wiser (?) rabbis to bring some form of clarity to his increasingly miserable situation.

The importance (and power) of storytelling comes into continual play, from the initial dybbuk tale to the anecdote told by Rabbi Nachtner (George Wyner) regarding a dentist who discovers Hebrew inscriptions in the teeth of a goy patient. Even in the realm of physics storytelling plays an essential role, as in the paradoxical parable of Schrödinger's cat -- which Larry's student Clive professes to completely understand, although he's not so good with the math.

Meanwhile, young Danny prepares for his Bar Mitzvah by smoking pot and aping liturgy from 78 rpm recordings on the hi fi.

While it all sounds fairly mundane (if convoluted), there's something more than a little unnerving about the scenario envisioned in A Serious Man: the oddly desolate suburban setting; the dangerously confrontational deer-hunting neighbor; the peripheral yet undeniable sense that something is slightly askew and out of whack in Larry's ominously repetitive, purgatorial world. As we approach the startlingly apocalyptic ending, things become ever more surreal, with Larry's dreams blending into his reality. He derives Heisenberg's uncertainty principle on the blackboard before a class of astonished students; he helps his fugitive brother to escape by canoe across the border into Canada. (Or at least he tries to.)

Finally, in desperation, Larry falters on a point of morality, and Judgement of the swiftest sort descends on him with an implacable iron fist.

If this 105-minute undertaking sounds like a dense morass of narrative complexity, that's because it is. But it's also bursting forth with the kind of off-kilter, subversive, character-driven humor typical of a Coen Brothers production.

And then -- BAM! -- that ending!