A Job Badly Done

 

The Coen brothers’ latest film, A Serious Man, is unquestionably one for themselves. This is not particularly surprising, since, in the wake of the enormous artistic and financial success of their adaptation of No Country for Old Men, the brothers have reached a point in their careers in which they have the ability to make any film they want, exactly the way they want it. They have done precisely this in A Serious Man, and the result is a funny, strange, enigmatic, sometimes disturbing, and incredibly vicious satire of Jewish American life. It is also, perhaps as an inevitable result of the brothers’ tendency toward artistic narcissism, a depressingly cruel and empty film.

A Serious Man is malicious right from the start. It opens with a lengthy prologue set in an Eastern European shtetl a hundred years before the main action. While the dialogue is entirely in Yiddish and references (inaccurately) the kabbalistic concept of the dybbuk, the sequence is actually a fairly conventional ghost story, and the Coens themselves have freely admitted that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the movie. It seems to exist purely for the sake of depicting an old man being stabbed through the heart and then playing the results for laughs. For better or worse, this sets the tone for more or less everything that follows.

Without explanation, the film promptly shifts to a suburban Minnesota Jewish community in the late 1960s, much like the one in which the Coens themselves grew up. Indeed, it is probably safe to assume that much of A Serious Man is a patchwork of daydreams, resentments, and nightmares culled from their childhood memories. Said childhood could not have been particularly pleasant, as the story—to the extent that there is one—is pitiless to the point of metaphysical sadism. It recounts the tale of Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a mild-mannered professor of physics whose relatively contented existence suddenly and inexplicably begins to implode. One day, in the first of many shocks to come, Larry’s wife Judith (Sari Lennick) announces that she is leaving him to marry Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), a smooth-talking, wealthy, and appallingly sleazy family friend. To add insult to injury, she demands that he consent to a get (religious divorce), essentially insisting that Larry give up their marriage without a fight.

Larry’s troubles are not confined to the home, however. Slowly but surely, it begins to seem as if the entire world is conspiring against him, wreaking havoc on his already frayed nerves. He is up for tenure at the university, but someone is writing poison pen letters about him to the academic committee. One of his students is unhappy with his failing grade and offers him a bribe to change it; when an indignant Larry refuses, the boy’s father threatens to sue him. Meanwhile, his ill-tempered (and vaguely antisemitic) next-door neighbor is beginning to encroach on his property—that is, when he isn’t returning from hunting trips with large, dead animals strapped to the roof of his car. His neighbor on the other side is no less of a trial for Larry, this time in the seductive form of a bored housewife who has taken to sunbathing nude in the backyard and plying her potential conquests with marijuana.

The situation only intensifies when Sy and Judith suddenly decide that things would be better for all involved if Larry moved out of his home. This forces the beleaguered professor to shack up in a local motel with his brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), a demented genius who spends most of his time scrawling bizarre mathematical equations in a small notebook. Meanwhile, Larry’s children are happily on their own way off the deep end, his son spending most of his time in a pot-induced haze and his daughter going out of her way to be as absent as possible from everybody’s lives.

Desperate to find an answer to his troubles, Larry turns to his faith. He seeks out the advice of three rabbis, to no avail. The first, a young man new to the profession, has nothing to offer but stale platitudes and an irritatingly unctuous smile. He is so inept, in fact, that it takes an entire conversation for him to realize that Judith is leaving Larry, and not the other way around. The second, a well-meaning fool who compensates for his stupidity by adopting the false joviality of a motivational speaker, responds to Larry’s desperate plea for help by telling him a long and convoluted story about a Jewish dentist who finds the Hebrew word for “save me” etched into a “goy’s” teeth. This ridiculous tale ends up going nowhere, and when Larry asks for the moral of the story, the rabbi simply mouths empty pieties about God working in mysterious ways. As for the third, an elderly sage revered by the community, his formidable secretary refuses to allow Larry to see him: The great master, who is glimpsed doing nothing but staring blankly into space, is “too busy.”

Feeling abandoned by his family, his community, and God, and utterly unable to make sense of his suffering, Larry struggles to find the answer the rabbis cannot or will not give him. Later, at his son’s bar mitzva, partially reconciled with his wife and embraced by the community once again, he does seem to find a moment of peace and repose—although, unbeknownst to him, the boy is stoned out of his mind the entire time. Finally, the film ends with a twist that, while its implications are not fully revealed, appears to be even more cruel and unjust than anything that has come before. With its last, enigmatic image, we are left with the suggestion of some terrible, even apocalyptic judgment.

 

It may or may not have been the Coen brothers’ intention to make a “Jewish movie” with A Serious Man, but there is no doubt that, in the sense that the film is laden with references to Jewish language, culture, religion, and even mysticism, it is the most ostentatiously Jewish major motion picture to come out of Hollywood in years. In fact, the film’s title was translated into Hebrew as Yehudi Tov (“A Good Jew”) for its Israeli release. Yet as some commentators have already noted, this may not be an entirely good thing. The film makes no attempt whatsoever to present a realistic or nuanced picture of Jewish American life, giving us instead a series of caricatures, some of them so ugly that no non-Jewish filmmaker could have gotten away with them. Almost all the characters are varying degrees of weak, manipulative, uncaring, lecherous, stupid, capricious, selfish, narcissistic, or amoral, and sometimes downright malicious and evil. Even Larry, whose moral integrity and sense of decency are emphasized throughout, is ultimately little more than a craven doormat. Whether intentional or not, the film adds up to a decidedly brutal evisceration of the shallowness and quiet violence of assimilated Jewish American life.

At first glance this is somewhat off-putting, but those of us who grew up in similar surroundings will admit that the portrait is not without a measure of perceptiveness. The depiction of the three rabbis, for example, is a devastating yet all-too-familiar one: Faced with a desperate man looking for answers, the first two are too cowardly to admit that they have no idea how to help him, and the third is too cloistered, vain, and probably senile to acknowledge his existence. Many of us, if caught in an honest moment, would have to admit that the Coens did not venture too far from reality here—a reality we ourselves have come across once or twice in our lives.

This holds true for the depiction of Larry’s relatives, friends, and neighbors. Grasping, selfish, spoiled, and vampiric, they seem to feel entitled to exploit Larry’s weak-willed good nature to their advantage. When their demands become blatantly unreasonable, they are perfectly willing to use emotional blackmail to get what they want, and they seem to enjoy watching Larry squirm with guilt for even thinking of refusing them. Most of us have known a Larry or two in our lives: middle-age Jewish men who have become the all-purpose slave of everyone to whom they happen to be related. Taught almost from birth to regard this state of affairs as their destiny in life, the Larry Gopniks of the world feel an almost moral obligation to debase themselves for the benefit of others. So complete is their conditioning, in fact, that it never occurs to them that other options exist, such as simply saying no. Indeed, the Coens’ portrayal of this tragic but very familiar type is so accurate that it is frankly difficult to watch. Throughout the film, one longs for Larry to lash out at least once at the mob of parasites surrounding him, but we know he won’t, and, of course, he never does.

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.