The Film
After giving us one of the best films of the ’00s in No Country for Old Men, the Coen Brothers decided to slip one more in before they ended with A Serious Man, which also finds itself high on the list of this past decade’s accomplishments. A decidedly different film than anything the Coens wrote and directed yet this century, A Serious Man hearkens back to the Barton Fink era for the brothers, and in some ways it feels like they’ve come full circle — revisiting similar themes while displaying an increasingly brilliant pair of minds that are currently among the greatest in American cinema.
A Serious Man is deeply idiosyncratic — Coen fans will relish the often uncomfortably black humor and the rhythmic quality that the editing takes on — but it’s not an exercise in irrelevance, even though the film’s potential to alienate is obvious.
While working within their very specific framework, the Coens, along with cinematographer Roger Deakins, have meticulously crafted a cinematic world where every shot feels vital to the film’s structure. So many films being produced currently — even ones that are generally agreeable — have their share of throwaway scenes that might propel the film along, but are rather meaningless on their own merits. Not a Coen scene — the frame is always filled with something carefully designed to add meaning to the film, and it results in sheer pleasure amongst the consternation that the plot might evoke.
In A Serious Man, physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg in one of the year’s top performances) finds himself increasingly beleaguered by life — his tenure committee is receiving letters defaming him, his unemployed brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is always moping around the house, sebaceous cyst in tow, and his wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), is leaving him for bearish family friend Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), who’s all too eager to console him.
Stuhlbarg is fantastic as the alternately frantic and cautious Larry — a modern-day Job who can’t seem to find any answers, even from those who should know what they are. Character actors Melamed and Kind are at their best here too, adding grief to Larry’s life with their respective smarminess and ineptitude.
On its surface, A Serious Man plays like a string of bad luck and missed opportunities, punctuated by a very specific set of Jewish quirks, but there’s plenty more to the equation, and the film is rife with metaphysical and moral mysteries. From its seemingly unconnected opening prologue in Yiddish to its haunting final shot, A Serious Man has the feel of a film you’ll be coming back to again and again.
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