Larry Gopnik wears a most peculiar expression on his face. He appears bemused, a man who is gradually learning how silly it is to take life too seriously. He’s a physicist who finds comfort in the black and white world of math where everything is yes or no, true or false, right or wrong. Or, as he puts it to his class, the cat is either alive or it is dead.
Gopnik is the hero of A Serious Man, the latest bit of austere craziness from the Coen brothers. We meet him as he faces enough hardships for three or four Gopniks. He’s being examined and x-rayed by a worried looking physician. His wife is fooling around and wants a divorce. He’s up for tenure, but someone is sending the college letters urging his dismissal. And some guy from the Columbia Record Club keeps calling him and demanding that he pay for Santana’s Abraxas.
More than anything else, Gopnik and his wife and their two teenage children are identified as being Jewish. His son spends his free time learning to recite the Torah in Hebrew – in preparation for his bar mitzvah. And much of the movie is divided into three titled sections corresponding to meetings with three increasingly older and wiser rabbis.
This brought memories flooding back from a time I spent reading about Judaism and Kabala while writing about Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence. A major lesson taught by those disciplines – and emphasized here by all three rabbis – is the absolute unfathomable workings of God, the impossibility of even knowing for certain if an occurrence is for good or for evil.
Gopnik is like Job. His is a story of bad things happening to a good man that asks, “Why are the good made to suffer?” By the end, Gopnik, who once used math to prove the certainty of things, fills enormous blackboards – albeit in his dreams – to prove that the universe is ridiculously, even cruelly, uncertain. He probably ends up believing in zombie cats.
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Article comments
1 - Victor Lana
You have captured the movie nicely here. I saw it last night and enjoyed it very much. I think I will be forever disturbed by that opening scene with the old man, but the rest of the movie will stay with me as well.