I know that this may not be a popular opinion, but I wasn’t a fan of Burn After Reading, Joel and Ethan Coen’s previous directorial effort. Sure, it was well-shot and had a great cast, but personally I have a hard time enjoying movies that treat their characters with enough sociopathic condescension and contempt to make a starving Hannibal Lecter wince in discomfort.
So, needless to say, I was apprehensive about the Coen brothers’ new black comedy, A Serious Man, since everything I had heard about it suggested that it had the potential to be even more sadistic than its predecessor. Indeed, the film’s protagonist, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) definitely gets put through the psychological wringer: A mild-mannered, middle-aged physics professor living in a mostly Jewish Minnesota suburb during the 1960s, Larry is about to make tenure when a legion of misfortunes gradually begins to crowd in on him. One of his students attempts to bribe him for a passing grade; his wife announces that she’s leaving him for a more self-assured family friend; his son is getting into trouble at Hebrew school; his ailing brother gets arrested for gambling–I could go on.
Despite this onslaught of pain and suffering, however, A Serious Man didn’t bother me in the way that Reading did, mainly because it allows the audience a measure of sympathy for the protagonist. Larry isn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but, thanks both to the Coens’ writing and Stuhlbarg’s impressive performance, he’s likable enough that we feel his pain even while we’re occasionally laughing at it.
Larry’s character, therefore, provides a solid jumping-off point for the Coens’ meditations on life, the universe and everything. The core of the film lies in the visits Larry pays to his local rabbis in an attempt to glean some spiritual meaning from his trials and tribulations. Some of the rabbis are well-meaning enough, but the parables they offer him are as abstract and useless as the thought experiments Larry offers his students–concepts that Larry admits even he barely understands.
So while the philosophical questions the film offers may be deep, its non-answers are basically the better-articulated equivalent of Reading‘s “What did we learn?” conclusion. I can live with that, especially since the movie delivers a parade of imaginative, immaculately-executed sequences, from a bizarre opening folk tale performed entirely in Yiddish to a series of alternately unsettling and hilarious nightmares. Even the abrupt, unconventional ending manages to be conclusive and satisfying in its own way.
Of course, the Coens’ command of the cinematic form has never been in question. What distinguishes A Serious Man from their lesser works is its harnessing of its creators’ keen stylistic sense to a story and characters that the viewer can actually care about. As for Burn After Reading, hopefully the Coens have learned not to do that again.
