Leave it to Joel and Ethan Coen to turn the quotidian struggles of a middle-class Jewish family in 1960s suburbia into a dark, brooding masterpiece. A Serious Man is the Coen brothers’ most relentless black comedy to date. Crafted with a subtler hand than last year’s middling Burn After Reading, A Serious Man takes that film’s dark comedic beats and places them into a world so tense and bleak that it more closely resembles the brothers’ blood-soaked Oscar winner No Country for Old Men. It is a surreal, dreamlike film with the fortitude to confront serious existential and religious issues, though always punctuated with grim laughter. With an unwavering eye and a heavy heart, the film asks: What do you do when your whole world is falling apart?
The film offers an immediate answer, opening with a quote from the medieval rabbi Rashi: “Receive with simplicity everything that comes to you.” The further the film goes, however, the more this seems like a sick joke, an impossible request from the impossibly pious. As protagonist Larry Gopnik suffers an unbearably difficult few weeks—crumbling marriage, endangered tenure, and serious financial troubles are just the highlights—he struggles to keep himself respectable in the eyes of God and the community.
Gopnik is brilliantly portrayed by Michael Stuhlbarg. Rather than fly into a rage or fit of tears, as less confident actors might, Stuhlbarg creates a tremendous inner tension—keeping the gun on screen without pulling the trigger, so to speak. It is a serious performance of a serious man worthy of some serious accolades.
Although the cast of A Serious Man was largely unknown—a break from the Coen brothers’ tendency to pull from their familiar stable of greats—they were uniformly mesmerizing and effective. Fred Melamed stood out as Sy Ableman, the infuriatingly levelheaded interloper into Gopnik’s marriage. Richard Kind of Mad About You fame floated through most of the film as Larry’s unemployed loser brother, only to dominate one gut-wrenchingly honest scene in the film’s final act.
The behind-the-scenes crew was much more familiar—A Serious Man is a visually rich film, compliments of cinematographer Roger Deakins, rounding out his tenth collaboration with the Coens. Wide establishing shots and saturated colors emphasize the bleakness of midwestern suburbia, and the film’s final image (I won’t ruin it for you) is absolutely stunning.
Still, A Serious Man is not an easy film to watch. It is emotionally draining, spiritually brutal, and oppressively bleak. It is staunchly imbedded in both Midwestern and Jewish culture, which may leave some at a loss for context. However, it is also one of the most fascinating, genre-bending, powerful films of the year, and the moments of comedy are pure gold. The details may be esoteric but the questions are universal.
