 Newspaper View
 Print
 Email
 Comment
 RSS
 Bookmark
If you would like to bookmark this article you will need to Login to your tulsaworld.com account
close
A Serious Man
Larry Gopnik has a seemingly idyllic existence until life comes crashing down around him in "A Serious Man." Courtesy photo
By MICHAEL SMITH World Scene Writer
Published: 11/20/2009 2:21 AM
Last Modified: 11/20/2009 8:50 AM
Larry Gopnik is a fortunate man, or so it appears. He has a family. He's up for tenure in his college professor's position. His son's bar mitzvah is coming up.
But Larry is about to be tested. His Jewish faith, his patience, his fidelity, his conscience — all are about to be tested.
Larry is a character in a Coen Brothers film, and in "A Serious Man," Joel and Ethan Coen show they are not finished with themes of randomness, uncertainty and misreading the signs in our lives, all visited in last year's "Burn After Reading," and renewed here in similar black comedy style.
Signs of faith hold a clue to what the filmmakers are up to here. The Coens have always inserted literary allusions in their films, sometimes lightly, or as heavy as Homer's "Odyssey" in their "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" Their reference book in "A Serious Man" is the Bible.
Larry, in this case, would be Job. His Jewish lifestyle and faith color all facets of the film. Do you know what a dybbuk is? It's OK, its depiction is among the many Jewish terms that come to hilarious life without one knowing what they mean.
The Coens are also Jews from Minnesota, and in what may be as close to biographical cinema as the pair will come, they have fashioned Larry as a suburban Minnesota resident and a professor (like the Coens' father) whose seemingly idyllic existence is about to fall apart.
Larry thought he was surrounded by love. But as the groovy Jefferson Airplane classic rock staple tells us — the tune comes up repeatedly in this late-1960s-set film — "When the truth is told to be lies, and all the joy within you dies, you better find somebody to love."
Michael Stuhlbarg, a Tony Award nominee for "The Pillowman," plays Larry and is among the many Broadway performers populating the Coens' 14th film, with perhaps Adam Arkin and TV veteran Richard Kind ("Mad About You") the most recognizable faces in the cast.
This deliberate employment of unfamiliar faces fits the anonymous blending of society, colleagues, neighbors and even family in the story that the Coens are telling. Larry is like most people in these situations: He thought everything was fine until it came crashing down around him.
His wife wants a divorce, but that's not all: She's had an affair of the heart with a neighbor and wants to remarry. Larry's son is smoking pot, his daughter is sneaking money from his wallet for a nose job, and an Asian student is bribing the cash-strapped teacher for a better grade.
The filmmakers fill their pictures with unsympathetic characters, and the argument can be made that Larry is the only sympathetic person shown in what is very much a suburban hell. Like Job, he is a decent man to whom bad things happen, and he's never going to learn why he must bear so much pain.
It wouldn't be a Coen Brothers film without the bitter pill of Larry's existence being leavened by ridiculous supporting characters: meetings with random rabbis (except the one he thinks can help him); his tough-guy neighbor poaching land across his property line; his brother who must perpetually drain a cyst on his neck. All are everyday people who lighten the film's mood, if not the dark cloud above Larry's head.
"A Serious Man" would seem to be about a man who has been serious about the banal basics — roof over his head, food on the table, good grades from the kids — but who is, for the first time, waking up to the fact that life has more to offer. And some of it stinks.
A SERIOUS MAN
Stars:
Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard
Kind
Theater:
Circle Cinema
Running Time:
1 hour, 45 minutes
Rated:
R (language, some sexuality/
nudity and brief violence)
Quality:
 (on a scale of
zero to four stars)
Michael Smith 581-8479
michael.smith@tulsaworld.com
By MICHAEL SMITH World Scene Writer
Copy Text
Search for this phrase/name
Close
Newspaper View
Print
Email
Comment
RSS
Bookmark
If you would like to bookmark this article you will need to Login to your tulsaworld.com account
close
 |
|
