The Coens' Best? - Surely You Can't Be Serious

A Serious Man

**** out of ****

Directed by: Ethan and Joel Coen

Starring: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick and Adam Arkin

Running Time: 105 minutes

Jefferson Airplane’s psychedelic classic “Somebody to Love” is heard quite often in A Serious Man, the Coen Brothers’ latest cinematic treat.

As the lyrics go: When the truth is found to be lies / And all the joy within you dies / Don’t you want somebody to love? / Don’t you need somebody to love?

Replaying at several points in the film, the song accompanies the protagonist’s journey to find peace and love, but mostly understanding. It is one of the most intriguing usages of rock and roll in contemporary cinema. Like the film, the rock staple is hypnotic, sardonic and full of mystery.

A Serious Man follows our cursed protagonist, Larry Gopnik (Tony-nominated actor Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor with a son weeks away from being Bar Mitzvah-d.

Things are not going swimmingly for Mr. Gopnik. His wife (Sari Lennick) loathes him and has her eyes on unctuous widower Sy Ablemen (Fred Melamed). His children sneak money from his wallet for their own dastardly means. His unemployable brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), sleeps on his couch and is hiding from the police due to gambling debts.

Not to mention that one of his flunking students leaves an envelope full of money on his desk, bribing him to retake the physics midterm. His tenure is being sabotaged by a spiteful hate-mailer. His neighbour on one side is an anti-Semitic hunter who encroaches on Larry’s property, while the other neighbour is a flirtatious woman who sunbathes in the nude.

The misery only continues to mount for our unfortunate professor. He wonders: Why is all of this happening? And does Hashem have anything to say about this?

Troubled, Larry seeks the advice of a divorce attorney (Adam Arkin) and three rabbis to clear the air and find out what’s going on. He wants a reason for all the tsuris and seeks to become a righteous, serious man, hoping that clarity will come to him in the process.

Joel and Ethan Coen received worldwide acclaim two years ago for their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s sinister bestseller No Country for Old Men. This time around, the brothers have adapted something even more unsettling, bleak and mysterious, although loosely, for the big screen: the Book of Job (although there are many allusions to Biblical parables and folklore throughout).

This is quintessential Coen Bros. The comedy is as fiercely bitter as vegetables on a seder plate (this may just be the funniest existentialist movie ever made). The characters are offbeat and colourful; this time, they just happen to be Jewish.

Despite their disgruntled personalities, the Coens make sure that the Jewish characters depicted here are not stereotypes, but troubled, sensible souls living in the void of an acculturated society.

Its setting is one that the Coens are quite familiar with, having grown up in the Minneapolis suburb of bland, split-level homes and dysfunctional residents that populate this film. Their reflection of conservative religious life is dead-on, depicting the monotony of Hebrew class to the graceful furnishings of a rabbi’s office with deft precision.

As Larry, Michael Stuhlbarg is wonderful. He does not portray him as a whiner, annoyed with his absurd hard luck a la Larry David on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, but as a well-meaning if insecure individual. We feel this man’s confusion and ponder his uncertainty. Through his sympathetic portrayal, his troubles become ours.

He is accompanied by an excellent ensemble of character actors. Standouts include Richard Kind as Gopnik’s troubled brother and Aaron Wolff, in his film debut as his boy Danny - who's soon to be a man.

Like the occurrences that Larry questions, the audience is left to ponder if what they’re being shown has any rationality or purpose in the film itself. How much you appreciate A Serious Man may have to do with how much faith you have in figuring out the perplexing philosophical drama and how badly you crave an explainable resolution.

The audience is an active participator in figuring this existential mystery out, and we're glad to follow our fellow Gopnik, however bizarre or puzzling his adventure becomes.

But even if you are underwhelmed by the film’s answers (or lack thereof), you cannot deny that the Coen Brothers are still one of the most meticulous and creative filmmaking teams around. They’ve brought us a bleakly funny and engrossing philosophical mystery that ranks among their finest, up with Barton Fink and No Country for Old Men.

I mean, if you’re not willing to accept Joel and Ethan Coen as two of the most masterful filmmakers around, you better find somebody to love.