A Serious Man

Started this post almost a month ago…then it just sat…

By which point (now) the film, seen by hardly anyone in the theaters, is probably about ready for a DVD release.

I had been looking forward to the release of the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man. It’s not that I’m a huge Coen brothers fan – I lean to the “empty formalism” end of Coen discussion – but they what they produce is different, at least, amusing, and always has fun actors.

And considering this had a purportedly religious theme – a contemporary Job – sure, I’d go see it.

The film is, indeed, a loose retelling of Job in the context of the Coen brothers’ childhood landscape – the 1960’s suburban-Minneapolis/St. Paul Jewish community.

It’s pretty harsh – on God and on the Jews, both.

(the film starts oddly – with a mid-19th century visitation of a (maybe) dybbuk…for what reason I am not sure, except perhaps to illustrate the concept of a haunting of sorts.)

This fellow, Larry Gopnik, a tenure-seeking physics professors, married, with two children and a brother living with him, is beset by troubles. His wife announces that she is leaving him, his children are not what he would want, his brother is a strange idiot-savant of a sort who eventually gets arrested on sodomy charges.  Plus, he is blackmailed by a student and his father.

He goes to 3 rabbis with his question – why is this happening?  They respond with various degrees of incompetence and inadequacy, ranging from the trendy empty to the traditionally empty, clear allusions to Job’s friends, who, as you recall,  are not helpful at all.

And if you wanted to scream at the end of No Country for Old Men (or The Sopranos, for that matter) , the end of A Serious Man will delight you. Not.

(I actually didn’t mind the end, though. It was life. You just never know what’s going to happen, and that’s nothing but true.)

I enjoyed the film while I was watching it for a few reasons. I liked trying to figure out what the Coens were about as it went along.  The actors were great and interesting. The era – those late ’60’s – is the era of my childhood.

(I have to say my favorite bits were those in which the department head comes and leans against Gopnik’s doorframe and they do their obscure little tenure dances. It was funny on its own terms and also reminded me of Gary Cole’s classic bits in Office Space, oft-imitated in our house…Yeah….that’d be great….)

If you want a more detailed synopsis you can find it any number of places, but here’s my basic issue with the film (beside the unrelentingly negative portrayal of Jewish life and Jews – there have been lively debates online about this, by the way, with some holding that the Coens are clearly nothing but self-hating Jews to others applauding them for getting the supposed vacuity of this type of American Jewish life and practice just right. I have no idea. Let’s just say, it’s not the most comfortable film experience ever, even if you’re not Jewish.)

Oh, back to my basic issue:

Job’s pain prescinds from a certain assumption: that Job has been faithful, devout, loves and serves God.

There‘s the agony of Job. He believes. He loves. He serves – and he’s been taught that the consequence of that type of life is blessing. But there’s no blessing to be had. There is a theological and philosophical grounding for his questioning.

In A Serious Man, we have no such ground for the protagonist. We know little about him and from what we can see and deduce, his religious life before the events of the film has been marked by not much more than superficial ritualism and identity politics.  Sure, the guy has questions, but they’re not the pressing, life-shaking questions of Job, who has believed certain things, not just about life in general, but about God and the world specifically.

A Serious Man ultimately falls short (fails? Yes.) because it purports to explore theodicy – the tension between God and the evil that befalls his creation , but the explorers – neither the protagonist nor the creators – seem to care much about God in the first place.

So…about that empty formalism…