BOOKS AND ARTS OCTOBER 9, 2009
-
Read Later
READ LATERAvailable only to subscribers. SUBSCRIBE TODAY
-
Listen
ARTICLE AUDIO
- Font Size
The wittiest scene in Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2001 film The Man Who Wasn’t There is one in which a fast-talking defense attorney, Freddy Riedenschneider (marvelously played by Tony Shalhoub), invokes Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle as grounds for a not-guilty verdict in a murder case:
We can’t know what really happened.… Because the more you look, the less you know. But the beauty of it is, we don't gotta know! We just gotta show that, goddamnit, they don't know. Reasonable doubt. Science. The atom. You explain it to me. Go ahead, try.
At the time, this routine seemed little more than an offhanded parody of the Michael Frayn play Copenhagen, in which Heisenberg and Nils Bohr discourse windily about the inscrutability of their past actions and intents. But the idea recurs more centrally in the Coen brothers’ new film, A Serious Man, when a beleaguered physics professor named Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) explains to his students that the uncertainty principle “proves that we can’t ever know what’s going on.” In this case, it is far less clear whether the assertion is intended as satire or corroboration of Frayn’s metaphor. Indeed, the movie itself is similarly difficult to pin down: part tragedy, part epistemological inquiry, part Jewish comedy of manners.
The film opens with a prologue, a 19th century ghost story set in Eastern Poland. A poor Jewish farmer returning home to his wife one wintry night brings with him an old traveler who may or may not be a dybbuk--the soul of a dead man sent back from Hell. The scene, played entirely in Yiddish, has no direct connection to what follows and might easily be considered an idle flourish. But it succeeds in establishing the aura of doom--unforeseen but inexorable, deaf to entreaty--that permeates what follows.
That doom belongs, for no given reason, to Larry, a family man living in a Midwestern suburb circa 1967. (The locale, like many of the other details--the Hebrew school his son attends, the ancient, sphinx-like rabbi revered in the community--derives in large part from the Coens’ own upbringing in St. Louis Park, on the outskirts of Minneapolis.) One day, Larry’s wife (Sari Lennick) informs her startled, oblivious husband that she wants a divorce. She has become very close, she explains, to another man, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed). Sy, too, is eager to discuss his romantic intrusion with Larry, to ensure there are no ill feelings. When he shows up on the doorstep, at once bearish and teddy-bearish, he engulfs Larry in a hug, promising “We’re gonna be fine.”
Further impositions press upon Larry from all sides: A student tries to bribe him for a better grade; an anonymous letter-writer slanders him to the tenure committee; a layabout brother (Richard Kind) nurses a sebaceous cyst while perfecting his “probability map of the universe”; a comely neighbor sunbathes nude under Larry’s desperate gaze. As Jerry noted in the Emmy-winning “Seinfeld” episode “The Contest” (under overlapping circumstances), “Something’s gotta give!”
But for Larry, nothing does give. Rather, the screws tighten, incident by incident--a car accident, an unanticipated funeral, an escalating series of legal transgressions committed by his brother. Larry seeks the counsel of a series of rabbis, but to little end: One advises him to witness evidence of the divine in a parking lot; another tells a fable with no moral; a third won’t speak to him at all. His quest for meaning, for some explanation of what is happening to him and what he might do about it, is a journey down an endless hallway of closed doors.
A Serious Man is the Coens’ most autobiographical film to date, and their most emphatically, if not always flatteringly, Jewish. The ethnic landscape they portray is so uniform that the few goyim in the film are presented as dangerous exotics, forever playing ball and hunting deer. There’s a strong whiff of Woody Allen to this cultural contrast (think the split-screen family dinners in Annie Hall), though filtered through the darker lens of the Coens’ vision. It may not be an accident that the actor who plays Larry’s truant son, Aaron Wolff, could easily pass for one of the young, red-headed Allen stand-ins who populated the director’s earlier films.
Of the Coens’ own oeuvre, the film it resembles most closely is, again, The Man Who Wasn’t There, a title that would have suited this film equally well. Larry is a passive figure, a glider on turbulent currents he cannot predict or comprehend. His primary act of will in the course of the film is the decision to seek advice--that is, the decision not to decide, to wait for a greater authority in this world or the next to tell him what to do. Stuhlbarg, an accomplished stage performer in his first starring film role, does what he can with the character, but the role is an inherently limited one, a center that isn’t really intended to hold. The primary suspense of the performance is whether, and when, Larry’s constant state of nervous puzzlement and despair will give way to something more assertive, more cinematic.
The film is often quite funny, especially when it casts a knowing eye on the rituals of middle-class Jewish suburbanhood at the very moment when they were about to have the generational rug pulled out from under them. (It is no coincidence that the movie is set at the time when Joel and Ethan were themselves coming of age.) And there are moments of genuine tenderness as well. But humor and empathy alike have trouble flourishing in the grim narrative soil the Coens provide, in which every cosmic joke is a black one. As Ethan explained in an interview, “For us, the fun was inventing new ways to torment Larry.” Over time, though, the fun becomes theirs alone. The game is too apparent and, for all the Coens’ craftsmanship, the accumulation of insults becomes deadening.
It’s possible to maintain such a delicate balance between tragedy and comedy, as the Coens demonstrated in their previous film, the bleak, disorienting Burn After Reading. But in A Serious Man the humor is broader and more familiar: the Jewish self-deprecation, the suburbs-as-purgatory motif. Here, too, one sees the directors’ hands moving behind the curtain a little too clearly: in the repeated red herrings where a scene builds to violent climax only to be revealed as a dream; in not one but two sudden deaths, the second played for laughs; in the strained gag presented when the wizened old rabbi finally deigns to speak.
Taken together with No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading, A Serious Man confirms a new phase for the Coens, darker and more probing than the easy farce that had characterized their work earlier in the decade (O Brother Where Art Thou, Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers). The universe they are now navigating is one of godlessness and capricious misfortune, in which no one is watching over us unless by CIA spy satellite. Despite its flaws, A Serious Man is interesting for what it adds to that vision, and for what it reveals, or pretends to reveal, of the milieu that shaped the Coens themselves.
Taken on its own, though, it is a frustrating film, a tease--and the fact that this is by design is little consolation. In one of his sessions with an unhelpful rabbi, Larry pleads, “Why does God make us feel the questions, if he’s not going to give us any answers?” After watching A Serious Man, one might be forgiven for posing the same query to the Coens.
Christopher Orr is a senior editor of The New Republic.
4 comments
Freddy: We can’t know what REALLY happened.… Because the more you look, the less you know. But the beauty of it is, we don't gotta know! We just gotta show that, goddamnit, they don't know. Reasonable doubt. Science. The atom. You explain it to me. Go ahead, try. george: Or to rephrase it: Emile Cioran: "This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this, and I do not. Everything is unique---and insignificant." george: The whole of human existence summed up in a single aphorism. In fact, just substitute the word "existence" for the word "second" and everything becomes exceptionally clear. Why....anything? Well, in order to understand WHY something happened one way rather than another we would have to understand WHY all that existed prior to it happened one way rather than another. Thus allowing for this particular permutation of events to unfold rather than a different one. And that means grasping the essential cosmological relationship between, among other things, time, space, matter, energy, evolution, biology, mind, personality, being, becoming. Not to mention going back to being nothing at all but star stuff again. Indeed, from the perspective of minds that no longer exist, oblivion must be a particularly problematic point of view. For example, it makes you wonder if Dr. Duncan MacDougall's "experimental" conclusion that the human soul [mind?] weighs 21 grams isn't just another urban legend. Scientists today certainly seem to think so. Though none of them will be able to tell you WHY. But, sure, in the course of living our lives from day to day, it matters a great deal why people believe what they do. And that is because why they believe what they believe motivates them to behave in one way rather than another. And that has consequences. And sometimes...for particular people in particular places at particular times doing particular things for particular reasons...those consequences can be dire. Or not dire, if the consequences are perceived instead to be, say, providential. Which just begs the question: Why do reasonable people evaluate and judge so many different circumstantial contexts from so many different moral and political perspectives? Does anyone really know WHY this is TRUE? Unless in FACT, it's actually FALSE, of course. george walton d/a
- iambiguous
October 9, 2009 at 10:47am
Here he goes again, the crackpot George Walton the pretend philosopher-king posting more nonsense. Quoting the former Fascist aphorist Cioran who believed as many Fascists did since it gave them comfort after the war that there is no reality that it’s all ambiguous. Loony George parodies this thought with the following pedestrian thought: “Does anyone really know WHY this is TRUE? Unless in FACT, it's actually FALSE, of course.” Wonder what loony tunes george waltune did that he likes to embrace ambiguity with such fervent passion. Is he a former convict? Whom did he harm? What did he steal? In any case did loony George even see the film he decided to comment upon, or did he stick his spoon in someone else’s stew because he couldn’t help it. This is an ambiguously weird fellow, this loony george.
- jacksondyer
October 9, 2009 at 11:25am
I may have to stop going to see Coen Brothers movies. Their latest efforts are so disappointing to me that they're threatening to dim my affection for some of their earlier movies -- among them the perfect noir "Blood Simple," the frightening and oddly human "Fargo," and the hilarious homage to fringe Dudes everywhere, "The Big Lebowski." Chris describes the movie perfectly here, and I agree with his general take. But I would be more harsh. Where Chris sees potential for an intriguing new dark chapter in the Coens' oeuvre, I see drift and cynicism. With "No Country for Old Man" -- which struck me as cinematically gorgeous but ultimately detached and tedious -- and now "A Serious Man" -- an ostensibly personal movie, not so cinematically accomplished, that seldom hits a true note -- I'm getting the sinking feeling that these guys might be full of shit. The movie echoes the Book of Job, putting its passive protagonist through a series of torments that lead him to wonder what it all means. That's the movie. "Nothing" and/or "Who knows?", seem to be the blandly obvious answers. But the Coen Brothers are not God or fate or the inscrutable universe. As Chris points out, *they* don't get off so easy. If nobody can tell us what life and its discontents mean, if they mean anything objective, the Coen Brothers should at least be able to tell us what their movie means. Why are they telling this unpleasant, not very funny story? There's a glimmer, which I won't give away, but it's not enough to rescue the story. That glimmer has to do with the protagonist's relationship with his brother, where human decency makes a couple of quiet appearances. Were those incidents God's point? I don't take the Coen Brothers to be speculating as such -- that would be too cute. Are we meant to look upon these moments as an affirmation of a human spirit of generosity and love that manages to manifest itself in spite of a crushing universe that offers no reward? Maybe, but it's not convincing, because nobody in this movie except for the protagonist seems like a human being -- monsters abound instead -- and even he is more device than character. The Coen Brothers have often used their camera to point and snort, but it takes on a snide aspect here. Maybe it's a fine line. "Fargo" induced us to chuckle at on-screen grotesqueries, but managed nonetheless to involve us with the characters. Or maybe I'm getting just a little older and have less fascination and patience with that style, and would not like "Fargo" so much today. As Stanley Kauffmann noted in the TNR web video interview, movies strike us differently at different points in our lives. This is both obvious but unstated in the world of criticism, where one tries to construct arguments that are not contingent on, say, what one had for breakfast. I should know better. In the fog of my first sexual experiences, I wrote a positive review of Godzilla for my college paper -- yeah, the '90s remake with Matthew Broderick. Ouch. Or maybe "Fargo" was a much better movie than "A Serious Man."
- jhildner1
October 12, 2009 at 9:19pm
I'm pretty well with jhildne--but much too late only having seen the movie tonight. The film is the revenge of the so hip it hurts nerds against a mainstream, conventional Judaism, in the movie circa 1967, they loathe. But what to make of a movie in which almost every person resembles an anti-Semitic caricature, complete with hunched shoulders, leg braces and "sebaceous cysts"? Most of the character range from the unattractive to the revolting. The themes are sophomoric: nihlilsm-lite; the meaning of existence for dummies, reducible to “shit happens: "When the truth is found to be lies/ And all the joy within you dies ..." The Coens are too hip, too sneering, too repulsed by us ordinary folks, too cutesy intellectual, too inside jokey, too brittle and affectless, too indifferent, too cold, and way too ersatz philosophical for my taste. I see them as the kind of people Obama was talking to in San Francisco, everyone all clubby and self congratulatory, when he was putting the knock on those Americans between New York and California who cling to this and that.
- basman
November 3, 2009 at 11:00pm