The biblical story of Job — whose devoutness was tested by just about every misfortune God could devise — gets a modern spin in “A Serious Man.”
Of course, God is not an active participant here. After all, this is a Coen brothers film.
The woes that plague college physics professor Larry Gopnik (appealingly schlubby stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg) require no supernatural explanation. According to Joel and Ethan Coen (Oscar winners for the nihilistic “No Country for Old Men”), this is just the way the world works.
Which doesn’t mean you can’t have a few good laughs along the way, even if the yuks are of the darkly sardonic variety.
“Man” unfolds among the Jewish residents of a Minneapolis suburb in the late ’60s — much like the Coens’ childhood home.
As a result, their new film is a spectacular balancing act, perched precariously between affectionate reminiscence and savage satire. One could almost think it borderline anti-Semitic except that it exudes a certain warmth — or at least what passes for warmth in the Coen universe.
It begins with a curious incident set in a Russian shtetl in the late 19th century. A man and his wife argue over whether a late-night visitor is human or a ghostly dybbuk. Soon the chatty guest has a big knife sticking out of his chest. Perhaps the superstitious residents are the forebears of the modern Larry Gopnik, and he has inherited a family curse.
Cut to the 20th century. Initially Larry seems to have it good. His biggest worries are whether he’ll get tenure and what his intimidating, gun-loving goyish neighbor is up to.
That soon changes when his wife (Sari Lennick) announces that she has fallen in love with the loquacious Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), an oily intellectual who behaves badly behind a civilized, moralistic exterior.
With a mentally ill brother, Arthur (Richard Kind) — who fills notebooks with arcane symbols, mad doodles and mathematical equations — the exiled Larry moves into the Jolly Roger Motel.
At work he faces a blackmail threat from a student who tried to bribe him for a passing grade.
He meets with a divorce attorney (Adam Arkin) who warns that the Missus undoubtedly will get the kids, the house and the bank account.
As things grow grimmer Larry seeks comfort and advice from the three rabbis at his synagogue. They offer, respectively, some banal Reader’s Digest homilies, cryptic yarns (including a whopper about a dentist who finds Hebrew sayings incised on a non-Jewish patient’s teeth) and a cold shoulder.
About the only thing going Larry’s way is a chaste but liberating encounter with an emotionally anesthetized neighbor (Amy Landecker), who sunbathes in the nude.
Occasionally the film spends time with Larry’s son (Aaron Wolff), a 13-year-old pothead who secretly listens to the Jefferson Airplane in Hebrew school, owes money to an oafish drug dealer and makes the mistake of getting stoned for his own bar mitzvah. Maybe Larry’s miseries are genetic.
“A Serious Man” gets its energy not from the performances (though they’re all good) or specific jokes (though there are many) but from the steady accumulation of details as Larry’s woes go from unsettling to outrageous to flat-out hilarious. That and the dead-on setting, which perfectly fills Larry’s kitschy world with sterile tract houses and blue donor boxes for Jewish charities.
Some are calling “A Serious Man” the Coens’ best film. I won’t go that far — it’s almost too insular for that.
| Sharon Hoffmann, The Star
@Nyx.CommentBody@