- Location: AFI Silver Theatre
- "When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies...then what?" This is the question at the heart of the Coen brothers' newest film, A Serious Man. Who would have guessed that rabbinic theology and Jefferson Airplane had so much in common? The specific "serious man" asking the question is Larry Gopnick (Michael Stuhlbarg), a Jewish professor of physics who has some problems, putting it mildly. For starters, his shrewish wife Judith (Sari Wagner Lennick) has recently announced she's leaving him for the truly serious Sy Abelman (Fred Melamed). There's also his brother Arthur (Richard Kind), who lives off of Larry's charity, splitting his time between draining his neck cyst in the bathroom and hammering out his presumably nonsensical numerology treatise. Larry's son Danny (Aaron Wolff) prefers getting high and watching F-Troop to studying the Talmud, and his daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) is mostly interested in washing her hair. As if his family problems weren't enough, Larry also faces tenure review, cheating students, racist neighbors, lawyer's fees, bothersome record companies, and some particularly disturbing dreams. Time to see the rabbi!
- Unfortunately, getting an audience with the senior rabbi proves difficult, so Larry is forced to wade through a series of subordinates instead. The first rabbi, a novice named Ginzler (Simon Helberg), tries multiple times to compare Larry's life to the parking lot. The second, Rabbi Nachtner (George Wyner), spins an entertaining yarn about divine dental revelation but has trouble with the essential interpretation step. Larry's professional life offers only uncertainty of the sort quantified by Heisenberg. His sultry neighbor tempts him with escapist sexual fantasies and marijuana. In my favorite scene, Judith and Sy drag him to the local Embers (an upper Midwest favorite), to persuade him to move into the wonderfully named Jolly Roger Motel. "I think, really, the Jolly Roger is the appropriate course of action," pronounces the ever-austere Abelman. Will Larry ever sort out his troubles and lead a happy life?
- A Serious Man answers this question with a resounding "probably not." In this film, nothing is certain except that life is usually awful. But could there be hope on the horizon? The unacceptably terse ending provides answers only in the form of approaching tornadoes and imminent health problems. It takes real dedication to end a film in a way that is even more philosophically unacceptable than its source material (The Book of Job), but the Coen brothers somehow pull it off. Fortunately, the rest of the experience frequently manages to entertain, if failing to enlighten. Sure, the misleading dreams and overemphasized hints at profundity grow a bit stale, but the Coens excel at using a quirky group of characters to tell a good, old-fashioned cosmic joke. Perhaps the film works best if we simply "accept the mystery," enjoy the show, and don't concern ourselves too much with philosophical suggestions made by two famously unserious men.
- I forgot to mention Adam Arkin as the lawyer. Several of the film's minor characters were also quite entertaining, but probably don't deserve to be named individually.
- In addition to being filmed in Minneapolis, the film even mentions the name of a real Minneapolis lawyer, Ron Meshbesher. No mention of Spence.
- The uncertainty principle is considerably easier to derive than Larry's dream would suggest.
