A Serious Man
Directed by Joel Coen
and Ethan Coen
In their scorchingly intelligent, profoundly surprising, and mesmerizingly punishing new film, the Oscar-winning Coen brothers return to the city, period, and faith of their boyhoods–and to the kinds of moral and theological questions that haunt intellectually precocious Jewish kids, which is what Joel and Ethan Coen must have been.
A Serious Man is nominally set in 1967 Minneapolis, but its true setting is an Old Testament universe in which God is a living but not especially comforting presence, curses are real, and evildoing is punished even as staggeringly difficult efforts to live a moral life go unrewarded.
The protagonist is Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a mathematics professor in his late thirties who is on the cusp of tenure–and whose life begins to unravel in the weeks before his stoner son’s bar mitzvah. But Larry’s story and the movie begin a century earlier, in Poland, when a traveling Jew (presumably his great-grandfather) returns home to his shtetl to tell his wife that he was helped on the road by a fellow traveler named Groshkover.
“God has cursed us,” she replies (the entire scene is in Yiddish), because she knows this Groshkover and he has been dead three years. When Grosh- kover arrives at their house and asks for nourishment, she dubs him a demon and plants an ice pick in his chest. After a moment, when Groshkover laughs at her impudence, something that might be blood begins to seep from the wound and he staggers out. And so begins the curse that wends its way through A Serious Man.
The Poland prologue is a startling accomplishment, like an Isaac Bashevis Singer story committed to film (albeit one Singer himself did not write). And it suggests the high level of literacy on display here. I do not mean by this that the Coens write well, although they do; I mean that the movie itself suggests they have spent a great deal of time grappling with and taking seriously Jewish themes and ideas.
Gopnik struggles to do the right thing, and maintain his faith, as his world comes crashing down around him. His wife Judith has informed him that she is leaving him for the oleaginous Sy Ableman (the splendid Fred Melamed). Someone is writing vicious anonymous letters to his tenure committee. His older brother (Richard Kind), who believes his schizophrenic chicken scratches in a composition notebook provide the answer to the universe’s uncertainty, is arrested for gambling and solicitation and needs an expensive lawyer he cannot afford, just at the time when a Korean student has offered Gopnik a bribe to change his grade.
Larry seeks answers from the community’s rabbis; one is too young to be taken seriously, another a gladhander who loves telling a good story but has no counsel to offer, and the third a universally respected ancient sage who refuses to see him because, as his secretary says, “The rabbi is busy. He’s thinking.”
This parodic vision of the stultifying aspects of Jewish communal life, and its sharp satiric portrayal of deadening Jewish suburban life, have already provoked passionate comments from readers outraged at what they believe to be a work of intra-Jewish anti-Semitism. That view is understandable–and there are moments here and there, as when Judith and her daughter are shown slurping soup in a disgusting manner, that cross the line from pointed satire into ugly caricature. But I don’t think it’s right. The nihilism that afflicts most of the films of the Coen brothers, and makes so many of them so unsatisfying, is not in evidence here. Rather, A Serious Man is firmly in the tradition of the longstanding Jewish argument with God.
The late scholar Abraham Kaplan offered this example of it in a 1980 article in Commentary
In a memorable hasidic anecdote, a congregant declares on Yom Kippur: “True, I have sinned; but what about You, O God? What about the suffering of innocents, unjust persecutions, the triumph of evil? Let’s call it quits–You forgive me, O God, and I will forgive You!” To which the [beloved sage] Levi Isaac [of Berdichev] is said to have responded, “No, no! You let Him off too easy!”
God is very much present in A Serious Man–and He is, shall we say, very just and not very nice. He smites two men in the movie, one in a car accident and one with a diagnosis of cancer. And He summons a storm, with the suggestion that all the bad behavior we have witnessed might just have caused Him to reconsider the Covenant.
Larry Gopnik’s attempt to understand why he is being put through the wringer is met with a decided lack of interest by his fellow Jews, who have decided that there’s no point in conducting the argument with God. But he can’t help himself, even if he does himself no good by engaging in the inquiry.
Ultimately, this remarkable film, by leaps and bounds the best thing Joel and Ethan Coen have ever done, is an inspired gloss on the greatest Jewish joke there is. A shlepper dies, goes to the World to Come, and is introduced to God. “Answer me this one question,” says the shlepper. “Are Jews the Chosen People?” Yes, God answers with a smile, the Jews are indeed the Chosen People. “Well,” says the shlepper, “would you mind choosing somebody else for a change?”
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
