Serious
is the man with the heavy heart. And boy, does this serious
man have issues.
When the Coen Brothers come out with a new film, it’s smart
to pay attention. These are the guys who have had audiences
chuckling for a decade with the bowling comedy "The Big
Lebowski," who came out of nowhere to wow Oscar voters in
1996 with the murder mystery "Fargo" and in 2007,
with the morbid best picture winner "No Country For Old
Men."
Their latest concoction, "A Serious Man," is now
spreading wider across the country, a low-key, high-stakes
suburban drama that made some waves among critics at the
Toronto Film Festival.
Featuring a cast of unfamiliar
names, the action centers around Larry (Michael Stuhlbarg), a
very serious and dignified man who does his best to live an
upstanding life as a pillar of his Jewish community.
On all fronts, he sees problems. He’s a professor, on track
for tenure, who nevertheless frets about whether he’s going
to make the cut. All his career, he’s tried to be a model
teacher, so much so that when a foreign student tries to bribe
him for a good grade in physics, BLAH threatens to expel the
kid.
On the home front, he has a teenage boy whose concerns are
limited to his upcoming bar mitzvah, his nightly sitcoms and
the $20 he owes a bully at school, for the marijuana that he
smoked up far too quickly. His daughter cares only about
washing her hair and going out with her girlfriends. His wife
has decided that she loves another man, kicking him out of his
house so he can live in a nearby hotel as they go about trying
to secure a divorce from the synagogue.
Rarely has a man squirmed so much on the big screen. Larry
doesn’t know what to do, or what the point of it all is. His
wife has had a change of heart almost overnight. His kids seem
like they could care less. His brother, Arthur (Richard Kind),
seems like a certified loser, sleeping on the couch because he
doesn’t have his own place and occupying the bathroom for
hours as he drains a cyst on his neck.
Larry hops from rabbi to rabbi, looking for help. And it isn’t
until late in the film that we realize the film’s larger
point involves the true powerlessness of us all. Just as Larry
frets about his tenure his son frets about bullies, and his
wife seems determined to jump ship, we have a hard time
looking beyond our horizons, at comprehending the bigger
picture.
Larry, played perfectly by Stuhlbarg, as a man who is both
competent but woefully ill equipped emotionally for the
stresses of adulthood, is a man who’s convinced that the
greater answers to it all lie in faith, or family, or tenure.
But during two scenes in the church, and one scene in a
parking lot, the Coen Brothers suggest that there is no
greater answer. What we have is what we have, and it could be
a whole lot worse. So savior what you have what you have. Don’t
be the "serious" man, be the man who cherishes what
he is by his side.
And in a final irony, just as these two filmmakers always seem
to do, they uphold the very things it would appear they are
working to debunk. In "Fargo," just as it would
appear that they are mocking Midwestern ideals, the Coens made
a movie that held up its naively optimistic people as saints.
In "No Country For Old Men," they turned a cat-andmouse
thriller into an epic standoff between good and evil.
And in " A Serious Man," they offer us up the most
fractured family imaginable only to end the film admiring the
way these four can fracture, and then come back together.
Larry’s answer to his many questions, about the meaning of
it all, is to be found in those three people who share his
house and his daily routine. Yes, they take each other for
granted and do each other wrong, but the key, as Larry learns,
is to not take it all so seriously.
E-mail: SnyderReviews@hotmail.com
|
