A Serious Man (15)

Alison Rowat's Review

These are not the best of times for cinemagoers of a nervy disposition. Last week it was Michael Haneke turning the screw with The White Ribbon. Now it’s the turn of the Coen brothers and their divinely executed tale of an ordinary man put to the test.

Never fear, though: rarely has having your ulcer tweaked been as much fun as this.

A Serious Man, the Coens’ latest offering after the so-so screwball comedy Burn After Reading, begins with a folk tale so gloriously bleak it would have made Dostoevsky chuckle. A husband tells his wife of a meeting with a neighbour on the road. Impossible, says she: that man is long dead. Cue a knock on the door...

The only purpose of this cod yarn is to set the tone – think raven black with shades of ebony – for the tale that is to follow. This one is set in bright new Sixties America rather than Old Europe, the 20th century rather than the 19th.

While the story of Larry Gopnik, family man and physics professor, might have echoes of Job, its heat, light and moments of brilliance come courtesy of writer- directors Joel and Ethan Coen.

Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), his wife, their two children, and his brother are Jews living in the Midwest. Though they worship separately and the children go to their own school, in every other respect they are just another all-American family in suburbia.

There’s a neat contrast between the endless skies above the suburb – British cinematographer Roger Deakins once again providing sublime light to the Coens’ shade – and the way the houses are lined up in military fashion below, neighbour within sight of neighbour. No man can be an island for long in such a society.

Lately, a lot of troubles have been washing up on Larry’s shores. His wife is unhappy. His children are more interested in the television than him. At work, he is up for tenure but the faculty is giving nothing away.

His brother has taken up near permanent residence in the bathroom, the better to drain a cyst in his neck (the noise from the suction machine he uses is a typically gruesome Coen touch, sure to haunt your mealtimes for days).

Adding to these woes, Larry is having problems with a failing student who refuses to accept the grades he has been given.

The only bright spot, and even that comes with a danger sign attached, is an attractive, pot-smoking neighbour who likes to sunbathe in the nude.

There is no single thunderbolt that has come Larry’s way, just a series of ever sharper shocks. Shaken, he turns to his faith for comfort, but meetings with junior rabbis while he tries to see the chief rabbi prove disappointing. One tells him he is “looking at the world through tired eyes”, another that “we can’t know everything”.

In the same way that he stands on his roof, turning the TV aerial this way and that to get a better reception, so Larry continues his search for answers. Stuhlbarg handles Larry’s growing unease with a marvellous subtlety, making it all the more convincing and unnerving. As a scientist Larry believes in the uncertainty principle, but as a man he needs answers.

This being a Coen brothers’ movie, Larry doesn’t have an ice cream in hell’s chance of getting answers. Not since Barton Fink has a Coen character been tortured as exquisitely as Larry Gopnik. With Barton, the weirdness of the world around him took some of the edge off the audience’s unease. We would never find ourselves in a place like that, in a job like that, with movie people like those. But Larry is Everyman. What happens to him could happen, might even be happening, to you. His very ordinariness is his most chilling feature.

Surrounding Stuhlbarg, who has spent most of his career in the theatre, is a cast that ranges from the somewhat familiar (Richard Kind from Spin City, playing Uncle Arthur, and Fred Melamed, playing footsie with Larry’s wife) to the complete unknown (Aaron Wolf, Larry’s son, here making his feature debut). The absence of any big-name stars adds to the low-key tone of the piece. Here, the Coens are letting their filmmaking skills do all the talking.

Though it is bleaker than midwinter, there are laughs to be had in A Serious Man. The Coens have a lot of fun with the period, taking affectionate looks at television, music, fashions – it’s high-waisted trouser heaven here – and social habits. But these are merely temporary respites from the gathering gloom.

If you are looking for a movie that’s a straight-out cheerer-upper, keep looking. Like life, A Serious Man rumbles on regardless, raising questions, rarely giving answers, but occasionally, mercifully, giving rise to a laugh. A picture to be taken with two aspirin, certainly, but not to be taken too seriously.

Paul Greenwood's Review

Never a pair to rest on their laurels, those slippery Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, follow up their two biggest box office hits to date (No Country For Old Men and Burn After Reading) with this impenetrable, anti-populist black (so very black) comedy.

So intent are they on confounding their audience, the mischievous scamps even open A Serious Man with a more or less unrelated prologue about Polish peasants spoken entirely in Yiddish.

The film itself is set in the late 1960s and may well be their most personal film to date, presenting us with their usual parade of eccentrics in the predominantly Jewish Minnesota suburbs where the brothers spent their formative years.

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a physics professor who is about to endure something of a tough time. His wife announces that she’s met someone else, his kids despise him, his no-good brother is sleeping on the couch and he has troubles at work and with his redneck neighbour.

As his angst grows and trips to the rabbi for help prove fruitless, he wonders just what he has done to deserve this torment. Like William H Macy in Fargo, Larry sinks deeper and deeper into the mire, except it isn’t of his own making.

He’s a decent guy, who tries to be a serious man, and he’s actually one of the Coens’ most likeable (and relatable to) main characters, just a poor schlub battling against the tide, and renowned theatre actor Stuhlbarg gives an exquisite, award-worthy performance of great subtlety and control.

Everyone around him is completely hateful, but poor Larry is put through something amounting to the Trials of Job to support the Coens’ thesis that life is just not very kind to some people.

It can be hard to watch at times, and if wasn’t played to such absurdist heights, there would be mass suicide in the aisles, so thankfully there is frequent bitter laughter in between the shudders.

It may take some time for A Serious Man to find its rightful position in the Coens’ canon. Without the many stylistic flourishes or big-name actors of their best known work, it could struggle to connect.

But the joy is in the richness of the characters that the Coens create, and the perfect – mostly unknown – actors they find to bring them to life.

Profoundly bleak, it’s essential viewing if you can stomach it, but it certainly isn’t one to enjoy.