Movie Review: "A Serious Man"

"A Serious Man" is the latest in the Coen Brothers' ouevre of twisty, quirky and all-too-real takes on life, this time evidently a somewhat autobiographical tale of Jewish life in Minneapolis, where they were raised, back to the tales of dybbuks in Poland from whence a large majority of Jews, including myself, descend. Although their previous films have featured Jewish characters (think of Walter Sobchak in "The Big Lebowski" -- "I'm shomer fucking shabbos!"), none until now have contained this much explicitly Jewish content, character and social study. They observe and remember with the skill of a surgeon's scalpel.

The film begins in Yiddish in a shtetl somewhere in Poland 100 years ago, where Velvel, on his way back from the market, supposedly encounters a famous Rebbe who was supposed to have died three years prior, succumbed -- geshtorben -- to typhus, but who, strangely, appears at Velvel's door following an invitation extended on the road back to town to enjoy some soup. Velvel's stout-legged wife is utterly nonplussed and, as if to attempt to seize control of her husband's mind whose sanity she doubts, promptly stabs the Rebbe in the chest with an ice pick to prove to Velvel that the Rebbe is, in fact, an evil dybbuk, a ghost. We are left to wonder just how dead is dead, the nature of reality and the role of God, ethics and morality - and humor - in the life and family around which the story revolves, though the humor is not always funny by itself but makes us laugh nonethless because of the very Jewish and therefore universally very human reactions against which it is all set and the remembrance most of us in the audience could relate to because of the fact that we'd lived it, at least in part.

For me, "A Serious Man" represented an attempt on the part of Ethan and Joel Coen to make sense of what doesn't make sense, and understanding that a lot of what Jefferson Airplane sang about (and which was prominently featured in the film, along with Jimi Hendrix) was and is the absolute truth:

When the truth is found to be lies
and all the joy within you dies
don't you want somebody to love
don't you need somebody to love
wouldn't you love somebody to love
you better find somebody to love

When the garden flowers baby are dead yes
and your mind [, your mind] is [so] full of BREAD
don't you want somebody to love
don't you need somebody to love
wouldn't you love somebody to love
you better find somebody to love

your eyes, I say your eyes may look like his [yeah]
but in your head baby I'm afraid you don't know where it is
don't you want somebody to love
don't you need somebody to love
wouldn't you love somebody to love
you better find somebody to love

tears are running [ahhh, they're all] running down your breast
and your friends baby they treat you like a guest.
don't you want somebody to love
don't you need somebody to love
wouldn't you love somebody to love
you better find somebody to love

Nobody, not even the great Minneapolis Rebbe who is seemingly too busy thinking to help Gopnik out of a continual stream of tsuris, or troubles, that plague him in his serious life, has a replacement for what really counts despite the all-too-human effort to exert control over the uncontrollable that is the life portrayed here in all its flawed humanity. To attempt to be "A Serious Man", as so many of the characters are in this movie (and we) attempt to be, turns into a joke that everybody, Jew and non-Jew alike, can understand and relate to: a joke that is equally upon us all, even on those whose business it ostensibly is -- physics professors and Rabbis included -- to try to explain the inexplicable, the incomprehensible and the neuroses that seem especially to plague Jews in particular, for a human savior like Jesus in whom Christians believe, does not exist, leaving redemption up to we small and inconsequential humans, attempting to just make it through the ridiculousness and randomness of life, the key to which we Jews turn to "Hashem" (God) and upon whom scorn and praise are heaped with equal vigor as it has been since the days of Moses.

I remember in my lifetime the smell of brisket, tension, sweat and fear coming out of lime green and bilious yellow kitchens presented in a loving homage to a time in Jewish-American history 40 years ago when the internet did not exist and the human condition, and that of Jews in America in particular, was not so sure-footed as it is now, at least superficially. It was a time when we Jews were still struggling to find a place in America. The struggle was obvious then but extant just the same even now.

The casting for this film was absolutely masterful; the Coens found faces that any of us with a glint of memory from the 60s and 70s will remember with a combination of awe and reverence, for those were the people who were still new to America or one generation removed from the old country and from whom my generation learned its Jewishness, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worst. Scenes inside the Hebrew school classroom were utterly masterful; I couldn't help but think of the stale air, linoleum floors and ghosts of the Holocaust that enveloped me as I tried to learn Hebrew from Hebrew teachers, some of whom were early immigrants from Israel and others old men whose breath was as smelly as my ability to learn that ancient language and with which I still to this day struggle, in part, no doubt, because of the utter lack of seriousness I took it all and the amount of time that I spent ditching Hebrew school to go to Mort's deli to eat kosher pickles and salami sticks, wastrel that I was and, I suppose, still am. I'll admit to being afraid of more mind-bending chemical agents, however, which evidently the Coens were not, to their eternal credit and our benefit. They couldn't have found better lines in faces which to spoke in large measure far louder and more earnestly than the lines uttered from the screenplay. This was a film in which some characters whose mere presence spoke volumes of history without uttering a syllable, especially the lineup of rabbinic and university secretaries who operated with the seriousness, function and aura of arrogant self-importance that one might expect of Cardinals in the Vatican, protecting the Pope from all earthly troubles.

"A Serious Man" gives us pause to reflect on the possibility that the joke is on us, that dybbuks -- even good ones -- still really exist, and that life is too short and mainly unpredictable to get too serious over, even for we serious men, solvers of the mysteries and problems of the universe, such serious men, men without a clue, as are we all. Hashem, whither thou art? Oh, never mind. We'll get by. We always do. Are You listening? This is the ultimate question to which we will never really know the answer, no matter how strong the belief, no matter how serious we take the mission of life.

Randy Shiner