Some might dismiss A Serious Man as yet another example of Jewish self-hatred. Such simplistic accusations have often been leveled at major Jewish authors and artists who tackle the more repellant aspects of the human condition head-on. Watching the film, for example, one cannot but recall the scathing novels of Philip Roth, with their infamous depictions of human frailty and ugliness, especially the often repulsive contortions of which the human body and personality are capable. A Serious Man contains such Roth-like grotesques as children who lie, steal, smoke pot, beat each other up, and curse relentlessly; a blatantly lecherous housewife who happily displays her aging body in public; a sickly brother who frequents male prostitutes, is incapable of forming a coherent sentence, and nightly drains the puss from his neck abscess; and, of course, an elderly rabbi with a face like a prune who swallows his own snot.

The Coens seem to be equally at home with more rarified forms of the absurd, such as the work of Franz Kafka. There is no denying that Larry is a decidedly Kafkaesque hero: He is a small, modest, beleaguered man who wakes up one day to find that the entire world has turned against him. Attempting to fulfill what should be a simple task, he is constantly frustrated and thwarted by selfish, even monstrous characters who treat him as if he were guilty of some terrible sin, the nature of which they will not specify, but that he is certain he did not commit.

Ultimately, however, what makes A Serious Man such a disappointment is not the vulgar characterization of its heroes, but the sloppy way in which it treats the essential questions that plague Larry throughout the film. For instance, why does God allow the good to suffer and the wicked to prosper? How do we reconcile this injustice with the idea of God’s perfection and love? Are we simply incapable of seeing the bigger picture? Have we sinned in some way without knowing it? And if so, how can we make amends for something we don’t know we have done?

These are, of course, very ancient questions, and as more than a few critics have noted, A Serious Man appears to be a modern retelling of the book of Job, perhaps the most famous attempt to answer them. Like Job, Larry is a fundamentally decent and pious man who is suddenly beset by inexplicable tragedy, trials, and suffering. He searches, as does Job, to explain his misery and make sense of a world that now seems utterly irrational, all the while trying to maintain his faith in a benevolent God. To an extent, the structure of the film is also similar to the biblical tale, with the three rabbis taking the place of Job’s friends who try to reassure him of God’s justice and the explicability of suffering.

Despite these religious and literary pretentions, however, it must be said that watching A Serious Man is not a rewarding experience. A film is not required to be enjoyable, of course, but those that are not usually make up for it by their profundity, intensity, or cathartic power. A Serious Man, however, simply sits there being unenjoyable. It appears, in the end, to have nothing particularly thought-provoking to say.

 

This emptiness is most strikingly borne out in comparison to A Serious Man’s ostensible biblical parallel. In the book of Job, a great many horrible things happen to the main character, but however one interprets the end of the tale—as an admonition to persevere in one’s faith or a despairing vision of the inscrutability of suffering—there is no doubt that Job and the reader receive some kind of an answer to the questions the book raises. At the very least, one is left with the sense that these questions are being taken seriously. In A Serious Man, by contrast, a great many horrible things happen to Larry Gopnik, and by the end of the film they are still happening. He never gets an answer, however inadequate, as to why they have happened, and the viewer has the nagging suspicion that Larry’s suffering is just one big joke. Instead of offering a moving—or at least sincere—exploration of an age-old problem, the Coens have settled for something that amounts to little more than a sadistic farce.

Clearly, the Coens believe that this constitutes, in and of itself, something like a work of art. The unfortunate truth is that this calculated nihilism is, in fact, the easy way out—a cheap and unoriginal substitute for actually saying something. Perhaps the Coens chose this route because saying something would have left them open to the same corrosive and contemptuous laughter in which they themselves specialize. This may be true, but it would also have forced them to acknowledge that not everything is a cruel joke, and that great art—even great comedy—requires at least some measure of seriousness.

Unfortunately for the Coens, seriousness also requires something else: the realization that, as absurd as the world may sometimes appear (and as the Coens clearly believe it is), our reaction to its meaninglessness is inherently meaningful—a phenomenon that sometimes goes under the name of art. To achieve this meaning, however, one must be willing to do more than simply sit back and have a laugh at one’s own narcissism. The Coens have shown some indications that they are capable of this, judging, for example, by Tommy Lee Jones’s somber final speech in No Country for Old Men. Sadly, it is nowhere to be found in A Serious Man. This is a great pity, because moments such as those the Coen brothers are currently enjoying, in which by virtue of their achievements they have true and unfettered creative control over their work, are a rare thing in the lives of filmmakers. If all they can give us in such moments are puerile exercises in self-congratulatory misanthropy, then American cinema will be the poorer for having to admit that two of its most prominent exponents are—despite their acclaim—depressingly unserious.