Stories that go nowhere are generally not good entertainment. But
stories about stories that go nowhere, as Joel and Ethan Coen
have shown with A Serious Man, can be incredible.
The 14th feature from the Coen brothers, Serious Man starts
with a message from the medieval Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki: Receive with
simplicity everything that happens to you. Then, for the next 100
minutes or so, things happen that are impossible to receive with
simplicity, because they appear, at least on the surface, to be
complex, meaningful and deeply connected.
Or maybe they’re just random events that coincidentally converge.
After a brief folktale featuring a 14th-century shtetl, a rabbi and an
ice pick, A Serious Man jumps forward to 1967, when the swirling
psychedelia of Jefferson Airplane is trying to penetrate the suburbs of
Minneapolis.
Professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is having an ordinary
day, trying to explain to a room full of physics students that they
cannot simultaneously know the precise velocity and location of a
subatomic particle. The world, as Heisenberg has informed us, simply
doesn’t work that way.
Meanwhile, Gopnik’s son Danny (Aaron Wolff) is $20 short on the
money he owes his pot dealer, Gopnik’s brother is slowly going insane
while siphoning pus out of an enormous cyst, and Gopnik’s wife (Sari
Lennick) is leaving him for a hairier, fatter, groovier man (Fred
Melamed).
And so Gopnik begins, in the manner of a traditional Jewish story, a
series of visits to increasingly renowned rabbis. He’s looking for the
figure in the carpet, the thread that will connect all the bizarre
elements in his life.
But maybe it’s the quest for patterns that’s the problem. As though
to provide a lesson for Gopnik, his brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is
also looking for connections. He’s developed a system for knowing
everything, which he calls “the mentaculus,” a kind of mental calculus.
Only, when Gopnik looks inside Arthur’s notebooks, he sees the
convoluted diagrams and graphomaniacal scribblings of the mentally
ill.
Is this what looking for answers leads to? It seems that the Coens
are saying yes: The effort to know more than we can, to acquire
knowledge of velocity and position, is a fool’s task.
Or is it? Arthur starts winning large sums of money in poker,
allegedly by using the mentaculus. After a student complains about a
failing grade, Gopnik finds an envelope full of cash. Did the students
leave it behind? The student’s father, mimicking Schrodinger’s cat,
both affirms and denies that the money is a bribe for a better grade.
And next door, a naked neighbor asks Gopnik if he takes advantage of
“the new freedoms.” Does this all add up?
While each event and element seems like a clue, it also seems as
though they only come together for the mystic or the madman. The first
rabbi (played brilliantly by Simon Helberg of The Big Bang
Theory) urges Gopnik to find the beauty in a parking lot. A
beautiful, beautiful parking lot. The second rabbi (George Wyner) tells
him a shaggy dog story about the teeth of a goy. And the third rabbi
(weirdly and wonderfully created by Alan Mandell) is mystically
unavailable, having discovered what happens when the truth is found to
be lies (hint: the joy within you does not survive).
I could go on to list plot points. They accrete like iron filings on
a magnet, building up wave-like patterns until they just have to make
sense. But the accretion may be the only sense they have.
The Coens are aware of the mystery, and know how to use sound and
silence, lighting and framing to bring this home. Jefferson Airplane’s
Surrealistic Pillow appears and reappears as though the lyrics
will lead us to the resolution of the plot. The empty sound of treeless
yards whistles to Gopnik as he stands on a rooftop and gawks at his
neighbor’s 1960s-style free-form bush. And every room, every face and
every empty street has a bumpy realism that makes it feel dirty and
true.
For the latter, cinematographer Roger Deakins is largely
responsible. Deakins has been nominated for eight Academy Awards. He’s
also the greatest living cinematographer. And yet, he’s never won the
Oscar. I’m pretty sure Deakins won’t win it for Serious Man,
either, because his work here, though utterly brilliant, is sharply
unbeautiful, and the Academy generally gives its award to whomever
shoots the prettiest sunset and creamiest bosom-in-tight-bodice. But if
there was any justice in the world, Deakins would not only get an Oscar
for this film, but retroactive Oscars for virtually every other movie
he’s made.
The Coens are also immeasurably helped by their amazing cast of
unknowns. Fred Melamed, as Gopnik’s wife’s lover, perfectly captures
the sudden infusion of feelingness that infested America in the late
’60s. Stuhlbarg is seamless in the lead, and Amy Landecker is
simultaneously creepy, repellent and erotic as Mrs. Samsky, Gopnik’s
liberated neighbor.
But the fact that the cast is unknown, and that the film doesn’t
answer all its questions, might hurt it with the average American
viewer, who generally prefers that his or her entertainment ends with
Simon Cowell announcing a winner. The Coens have a much better ending
for Serious Man. In fact, it’s the best ending I’ve seen in
years. So even if you have no interest in Heisenberg and mid-century
American Judaism and Henry James and perfectly photographed lawns, come
and check out Serious Man just for its final three minutes. They
will metaphorically blow you away.
This article appears in Oct 22-28, 2009.