“Writing is easy:  All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”– Gene Fowler

DIRECTED BY: Joel Coen

FEATURING: John Turturro, John Goodman, Michael Lerner, Judy Davis, John Mahoney, Jon Polito, Steve Buscemi

PLOT: Barton Fink is a playwright whose first Broadway show, a play about the common man, is a smash success; his agent convinces him to sell while his stock is high and go to Hollywood to quickly make enough money to fund the rest of his writing career.  He arrives in Los Angeles, checks into the eerie art deco Hotel Earle, and is assigned to write a wrestling picture for Wallace Beery by the Capitol pictures studio head himself.  Suffering from writer’s block, Barton spends his days talking to the insurance salesman who lives in the room next door and seeking writing advice from alcoholic novelist W.P. Mayhew, until deadline day looms and very strange events begin to take center stage.

BACKGROUND:

• At the time, it was widely reported that the Coen brothers wrote the script for Barton Fink while suffering from a mean case of writer’s block trying to complete the screenplay to their third feature film, Miller’s Crossing.  The Coens themselves have since said that this description is an exaggeration, saying merely that their writing progress on the script had slowed and they felt they needed to get some distance from Miller’s Crossing by working on something else for a while.
• Barton Fink was the first and only film to win the Palme D’or, Best Director and Best Actor awards at the Cannes film festival; after this unprecedented success, Cannes initiated a rule that no film could win more than two awards.  Back home in the United States, Barton Fink was not even nominated for a Best Picture, Director or Actor Oscar. It did nab a Best Supporting Actor nom for Lerner.
• The character of Barton Fink was inspired by real life playwright Clifford Odets.  W.P. Mayhew was based in part on William Faulkner.  Jack Lipnick shares many characteristics, including a common birthplace, with 1940s MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer.
• Following a definite theme for the year, Judy Davis also played an author’s muse and lover in another surrealistic 1991 movie about a tortured writer, Naked Lunch.
• According to the Coens, the final scene with the pelican diving into the ocean was not planned, but was a happy accident.
• In interviews the Coens have steadfastly disavowed any intentional symbolic or allegorical reading of the final events of the film, saying”what isn’t crystal clear isn’t intended to become crystal clear, and it’s fine to leave it at that” and “the movie is intentionally ambiguous in ways they [critics] may not be used to seeing.”

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Barton Fink is full of mysterious images that speak beyond the frame.  The most popular and iconic picture is John Goodman wreathed in flame as the hallway of the Earle burns behind him.  Our pick would probably go to the final shot of the film, where a pelican suddenly and unexpectedly plummets into the ocean while a dazed Barton watches a girl on a beach assume the exact pose of a picture on his hotel wall.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A nightmarish, expressionistic, and self-satirizing evocation of

the difficulty of creation, Barton Fink pokes a sharpened stick into the deepest wounds of artistic self-doubt.  A pure mood piece, its amazing ending achieves the remarkable triumph of leaving us with nothing but unanswered questions, while simultaneously feeling complete and whole.

COMMENTS: The most accurate word to describe Barton Fink is “enigmatic.”  It’s a work of many contradictions: it’s an intricately written script about a scriptwriter who can’t write; it mercilessly mocks its hero, and at the same time deeply empathizes with his torment; it’s a movie without an ending, which turns out to be the perfect ending.  Constructed around the idea of writer’s block, it’s one of the most original and inspired movies ever made.

Barton Fink should be understood as an expressionist work, a movie where portraying the mental state of the protagonist is more important than the actual details of the plot.  The script deliberately puts the viewer into a misleading mindset by playing out its first half as a straightforward Hollywood satire, then turns the tables on the audience when one character’s unexplained death seemingly turns the film into a mystery.  And a mystery it is, though not the sort of mystery with a solution that moviegoers intentionally flock to theaters to see.  The mystery here is, for lack of a more precise term, metaphysical.  What happened to Audrey?  Who is Charlie?  What is in the box?  Viewers who demand definite and certain answers to these questions will have to look to their own imaginations.  They will not get help from the Coens’ movie.

The movie does proffer a likely answer to all three of those questions, and that answer is: “something horrible.”  Does it matter what?  Does knowing the exact height and weight of the boogeyman in the closet make it any less scary?  Although the mysterious events of the denouement are sometimes impossible, and always unresolved, they are perfectly externalized reflections of Barton’s mind.  He is mired in a nightmare of his own lack-of-making: he can’t create, he’s consumed with doubts and thinks that he may be a hack, that maybe he only had one story in him and it’s out.  His self-identity as a writer is threatened, and he senses doom coming with his approaching deadline.  He has locked himself inside, as he says, the “life of the mind,” and “there’s no road map for that territory, and exploring it can be painful.”  These words are spoken early in his writing career, and Barton’s being pretentious and grandiose when he preaches about the necessity of pain to the artist, but the suffering he romanticizes will be made less ridiculous when it materializes as a nightmare inside the creepy Hotel Earle.

Approaching Barton Fink as an allegory, while too tempting for many to resist, doesn’t work either, although that won’t stop those who aren’t used to seeing intentional ambiguity in a movie from imposing an unnecessary rationalism on the script.  Broad symbolism is apparent, and important, but it only tells a small part of the tale.  The most obvious symbol is Charlie, Barton’s next door neighbor at the Hotel Earle, who represents “the common man.”  Barton, who pictures himself as the champion of the working stiff and wants to create a “theater of the common man,” is actually a stuffy intellectual who has almost nothing in common with the class he hopes to uplift.  At the triumphant wrap party for his proletarian play “Bare Ruined Choirs,” Barton celebrates only with other people in dressed in tuxes and evening gowns.  He’s initially disdainful of the idea of working for Hollywood, never seeming to consider that it’s the big screen, not the Broadway stage, where common man gets most of his stories.  When a real-life common man barges into his room in the fleshy person of Charlie (a masterful John Goodman) and offers him a drink, Barton feels only a mixture of fight and annoyance.  Eventually he warms up to Charlie, after the insurance salesman pays him a few patronizing compliments, but he’s not interested in listening to this common man.  Three times in their initial conversation Charlie offers to “tell him some stories”; each time Barton interrupts the salesman to continue his lecture on how he’s striving to create stories that will explore the life of average, everyday people just struggling to make it in this world.

Barton’s pompous defense of the common man in theory, coupled with his condescension to the common man who’s sitting on his own bed, is funny and ironic.  It demonstrates dramatically how he’s cut off from his own inspiration.  It also feeds into a viable interpretation of the movie as a parable about the failure of leftist/socialist intellectuals, who theorized about the proletariat more than understood them, to stop the rise of fascism in Germany.  There are several references to World War II and the approaching Holocaust in the film, which begins in 1941 a few weeks before Pearl Harbor.  At the end of the movie, studio mogul Lipnik is drafted to fight the “little yellow bastards.”  Two detectives have names which evoke the Axis powers.  Most tellingly, one character incongruously mutters the phrase, “heil Hitler.”  Barton, the wimpy intellectual, is impotent to stop the madness growing around him.

That interpretation is sustainable and ripe for the plucking, but it hardly addresses the heart of what’s tormenting Barton—that blank piece of paper in his Underwood typewriter staring back at him.  And it almost certainly doesn’t address the heart of what bothers the Coens, either.  If the conflict between Barton and Charlie symbolizes the ascension of the Nazis, then I suspect its equally true that, to the Coens, the rise of fascism itself represents something else, something more personal.

Unlike Barton, the Coens aren’t much interested in the class struggle or in using their art as a political platform; they aren’t enslaved to realism, social or otherwise, and discard it as an unwanted restriction whenever it gets in the way of the story they want to tell.  In fact, the movie could be read more as an aesthetic, rather than a political, indictment of the Finks of the world.  Barton grandstands that his art is important because it’s political and because it helps his fellow man, while avoiding plumbing the painful and messy depths of the human soul.  W.P. Mayhew, the writer Barton originally admires but comes to despise, is equally creatively constipated as the novice; the difference seems to be that the older writer’s alcoholism arises out of a real, rather than a theoretical, torment.

The Coens tightly pack lots of elements into the box that is Barton Fink.  The movie is almost impossibly stuffed full of recurring details to seize upon.  There’s the eerie atmosphere of the Hotel Earle, with its cataleptic elevator operator and ominously deserted hallways.  There’s hints of Barton’s sexual repression, seen in the spermlike paste which leaks off the peeling hotel wallpaper and the way he grimaces when Charlie shows him the naked lady on the underside of his tie.  There’s the broad comic relief of the Hollywood satire, with paunchy movie moguls talking out of both sides of their motormouths.  There are the indications that the Hotel Earle is hell itself.  There’s the fact that the little that we hear of the script Barton finally manages to write in a burst of inspiration, which he calls his best work, seems to repeat the wording of his play almost verbatim.  There’s the mystery of the significance of the picture of the girl reclining by the ocean Barton keeps staring it.  There’s the curious fact that the script inevitably refers to the movies as “pictures,” never by any other word.  There’s the fun of counting the number of times characters say the word “head.”  There’s that mysterious box Charlie gives Barton to hold onto when he leaves town.

“What’s in the box?,” Barton is asked at the end of the film.  Were this any other film, we could trust the hints that we had been given, and say that we know with certainty what’s in that box.  In this movie, we can’t quite be sure.  Like Barton, I don’t know what’s in the box.  Like Barton, I’m not so sure I want to know.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Gnomic, claustrophobic, hallucinatory, just plain weird, it is the kind of movie critics can soak up thousands of words analyzing and cinephiles can soak up at least three espressos arguing their way through… [the Coens] dreamlike realization of their script, though often imagistically striking, deliberately subverts their message and all too often alienates the viewer.”–Richard Schickel, Time (contemporaneous)

“…a middling ability to ape the moods and stylistic mannerisms of Roman Polanski, Stanley Kubrick, and David Lynch…  basically a midnight-movie gross-out in Sunday-afternoon art-house clothing.”–Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Chicago Reader (contemporaneous)

“The surrealistic writer’s block scenes, in which Barton silently watches wallpaper peel and its paste ooze, are particularly memorable–imagine ERASERHEAD in color. Ultimately, however, the look, sound and feel of this macabre comedy fail to support any coherent theme.”–TV Guide

IMDB LINK: Barton Fink (1991)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

At the Movies – Siskel and Ebert’s contemporaneous “two thumbs up” review from their television show

000_Barton Fink – fascinating multimedia presentation of Barton Fink, which draws connections between various motifs in the film and raises more questions than answers

Barton Fink at “You Know, For Kids” – basic information and trivia on the film from a Coen brothers fansite; poke around under the categories “scripts,” “multimedia,” and “reviews” for more Barton Fink goodies

“Barton Fink” – excellent excerpt from “Nietzsche: The Darkness of Life,” the Barton Fink chapter of Jorn K. Bramann’s “Educating Rita and Other Philosophical Movies,” suggesting that the movie reflects the irrational nature of art described in Friedrich Nietzsche’s “The Birth of Tragedy”

Coen Brothers Want John Turturro to Get Old for “Barton Fink” Sequel, “Old Fink” – Adam Rosenberg of MTV reports on the possibility of a Fink II

DVD INFO: Barton Fink took a shamefully long time to arrive on DVD, but in 2003 20th Century corrected the oversight with a one disc edition (buy). Extras are sparse: there are only trailers, a stills gallery, and eight inconsequential deleted scenes (the Coens don’t do commentaries, and in fact appear to be philosophically opposed to them).

An excellent way to acquire the movie is to spend a few dollars more to get the five-disc “The Coen Brothers Movie Collection” set (buy), which also includes Blood Simple, the nearly weird comedy Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, and Fargo. All are excellent movies.

[(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Deacon Lowdown.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)]

“Even though you can’t figure anything out, you will be responsible for it on the midterm.”–dream dialogue from A Serious Man

DIRECTED BY: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

FEATURING: Michael Stubargh, Aaron Wolff, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick, Fyvush Finkel

PLOT: A Serious Man opens in the indeterminate past with a Jewish couple entertaining a man who may or may not be a dybbuk (ghost) on a snowy night somewhere in Eastern Europe.  In 1967, in suburban Minnesota, a Jewish physics professor suffers from an escalating series of problems including a failing marriage, bratty kids, students willing to do anything for a passing grade, financial troubles, and a ne’er-do-well, mildly insane brother.  Seeking advice on a life that seems to be spinning out of control, he visits three rabbis, each of whom is less helpful than the last.

BACKGROUND:

• Though the film is not autobiographical, Joel and Ethan Coen grew up in suburban Minnesota roughly at the time the events of A Serious Man take place.
• The core idea for the movie originated when the Coens considered making a short film about a boy who attends his bar mitzvah stoned.  As the story expanded from that scene, the idea was originally to make the father and son’s stories of equal weight, but as the script evolved the story of the elder Gopnik assumed center stage.
• The prologue is not an actual Jewish folktale.  The Coens searched for an authentic legend to use but finally decided to create their own.
• The movie makes extensive reference to quantum physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, theories of modern physics which suggest that there are limitations on our ability to know basic reality.
• The Coens’ script for A Serious Man was nominated for a Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay Oscar.  The film won “Best Screenplay” or equivalent awards from the Boston Society of Film Critics, National Board of Review, and National Society of Film Critics.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  The very last shot, which I can’t reveal here.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Superficially, A Serious Man is only mildly weird. There are a

Official trailer for A Serious Man

few dream sequences and multiple nonsense parables, but unlike the Coens’ definitely weird Barton Fink, this story of a suburban Jewish man beset by an improbably mounting set of real life woes contains no surrealistic fireworks (although there is a conspicuous surrealistic pillow).  On the other hand, A Serious Man has a skeletal undercurrent of ambiguity and disturbance running through it like a bone cancer; it feels weird at its core.  With a head-scratching prologue and epilogue bracketing a central fable about a goy’s teeth, the thoughtful and frequently brilliant A Serious Man earns its place on the List by mining the mysteries at the basis of existence.

COMMENTS: A Serious Man is a retelling of that most fascinating parable in the Old Testament, the Book of Job, as a postmodern absurdist comedy.  The ancient Job was a good and prosperous man; God allowed Satan to test his faith by wiping out his flocks, killing his children, and smiting him with boils.  The beleaguered Job, bothered by visits from three unhelpful friends who try to console him with off-base theological speculations, eventually despairs, but never doubts God’s existence or goodness.  His only plea is to understand his misfortune, to be able to ask God directly, “Why me?”  God, appearing in a whirlwind, bitchslaps Job for his audacity: “who are you to question me, the Author of the Universe?  It’s your job to obey and suffer in silence.”  (I’m paraphrasing here).  After this reproof, God restores Job’s riches and lets him have new children to replace the ones Satan killed.  The author of the book even makes a point to remark that Job’s three new daughters are much hotter than the ones He let get iced.

The Coen’s Professor Gopnik is a more complex and human creation, and definitely a funnier one, than the purely symbolic Job of the Old Testament.  His suburban troubles are minor league compared to the pestilences Job suffered, but they’re easier to relate to: domestic troubles; bratty kids; oppressive legal bills; anonymous letters unfairly smearing his morals; persistent calls from the Columbia record club; and a layabout, unemployable brother living on his couch who spends most of his time in the bathroom draining his cyst.  The ex-friend who’s stealing his wife from him—himself a serious man—is insufferably and hilariously unctuous. He adds multiple insults to Gopnik’s injury, giving him bottles of fine wine and big bear hugs as he consoles the loser and calmly designs new sleeping arrangements for the trio.  Gopnik’s troubles mount and pile up on one another until he’s losing his mind, when, in desperation, he seeks help from three rabbis, each more obtuse and less helpful than the last.

Gopnik’s frustrated reactions to the absurd plagues that smite him, the indignities he suffers and the impractical advice he gets, are wickedly funny.  Not only is the film genuinely comic, it’s also firmly lodged in a lovingly textured, real universe: a Jewish suburban community in conservative Minnesota in 1967.  One thing’s certain: this film is so dripping with Judaica, you’ll feel ready to be mitzvahed after just one viewing.

Although we sympathize with Gopnik for his bad luck, he’s more complicated than good guy Job, because he’s such a passive figure.  Sure, he’s a family man who observes Sabbath and sends his kids to Hebrew school, but is this enough to make him a serious man?  We have to wonder whether his son would place an emergency call to him at his divorce lawyer’s office to ask him to adjust the TV antenna, or whether his wife would be so anxious to leave him for a more serious man, or if he would have gotten in so much trouble with the exchange student who’s trying to bribe him for a passing grade, if he were more assertive.  He’s a harmless man who suffers more than he deserves, but might he have brought many of his troubles on himself?  He seeks advice and waits for other people to solve his problems for him—even, perhaps, waiting for God to intervene—but could this failure to seize his own destiny be one of the sources of his multiple heartaches?

A seemingly unrelated story opens the film, a chilling fireside tale set in an Eastern European Jewish community about an old man who may or may not be a dybbuk (ghost).  The significance of this opening scene is debatable, but more than anything it seems to relate to the “well of Jewish tradition” the movie explicitly calls on as a way to understand suffering.  And one of the main features of Jewish wisdom, at least as the Coens present it, is that it’s a tradition that recognizes and even embraces ambiguity and mystery.  These stories the Jews tell each other over and over through the ages remind them that they can’t know God’s mind, but must go on and be faithful nonetheless.  The second rabbi’s hilariously absurd and seemingly pointless story about the Jewish dentist who finds a message from God on a goy’s teeth hammers that point home.  The movie begins with the rabbinical epigraph “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.”  “Accept the mystery,” counsels another character in the middle of the film (in a deliciously mysterious twist, he delivers this advice like a vessel of God, without actually understanding what he is saying).

There is a fascinating contrast between that opening scene and the rest of the movie: despite the fact that we don’t know if the visitor is a dybbuk or not, the peasant’s wife does.  Whether she’s right or wrong about his demonic heritage, she acts, decisively and irreversibly, in a way that her timid modern successor, Gopnik, never could.  Right or wrong, her act belongs to her; if she suffers misfortune for her deed, there will be no question why.

It was a simpler time back in the shtetl.  Gopnik, a physicist, has bewildered himself by probing deeply into quantum mechanics and the uncertainty at the base of the subatomic particle.  It was a stroke of genius for the Coens to make their Job a physics professor, because, like Judaism, modern physics has its own set of inscrutable parables.  When a student claims to understand the notoriously difficult paradox of Schrödinger’s half-alive, half-dead cat, an annoyed Gopnik shoots back “Even I don’t understand the dead cat.”  But the prof emphasizes that the math behind the paradox works, and that’s what’s important.  In physics, at least, he receives with simplicity what happens.  That proves to be a harder lesson to apply in real life.

The ending to A Serious Man is already notoriously divisive; some hail it as brilliant, others see it as a cheat, the act of filmmakers without a clue how to end their own story, who just snap the camera off on a cliffhanger.  I don’t mind endings that are ambiguous or inconclusive—I adore them when well done—but I have to agree with the detractors that A Serious Man’s ending is too abrupt.  A mysterious image that implies more than it says is a fine thing to end a film on, but the audience should have a chance to savor a building climax before the rug is suddenly pulled out from under them at a seemingly random point.  The Coens’ own Barton Fink ended on an even more mystifying note than this one, but that startling image came in an epilogue, after Barton’s final act had already been resolved in our minds.  The scene was a weird cherry on top, not the entire dessert.

A Serious Man’s final image is exceedingly clever when we remember that this is a retelling of the Book of Job.  The Coens remember their source, but have deliberately decided to end their tale just before the resolution of the Wisdom book, without giving a comforting answer to the misery but without irreversibly shutting the door, either.  That ambiguous ending is thematically consistent in a movie that insists that we can never understand our own suffering from the inside.  Prospects look bleak for Gopnik, but we don’t know for sure what happens to him or his family; perhaps he reconciles with his wife and she births him three more daughters, each hotter than his current nose-job seeking brat.  But that cleverness doesn’t make us any more satisfied when the scene suddenly cuts to black.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“As weird inconveniences spiral into operatic miseries, Larry dutifully searches for clues, answers, signs. He talks to learned rabbis and listens to recordings of famous cantors. What he encounters, apart from haunting music and drab suburban sacred architecture, is silence, nonsense and — from that metaphysical zone beyond the screen, where the rest of us sit and watch — laughter.”–A.O. Scott, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“If Philip Roth and Franz Kafka sat down to write an adaptation of the Book of Job, the result might be something like ‘A Serious Man’…”–Alsonso Duralde, MSNBC (contemporaneous)

“The movie raises more questions about the Coens’ storytelling depth and competence than it does about suffering and faith…  ‘A Serious Man’ has the cramped intensity of a mid-period Ingmar Bergman movie remade by a couple of secular-Jewish comedians.”–Michael Sragow, The Baltimore Sun (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITES: A Serious Man | Film Overview | Focus Features Movies – contains trailers, articles about the film, clips from the movie, short video clips incorporating interviews and material from the DVD special features,

A Serious Man | Facebook – Facebook fan page for A Serious Man

IMDB LINK: A Serious Man (2009)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

A Serious Man screenplay – The complete script of A Serious Man, in .pdf format

Coen Brothers Wreak Biblical Adversity in ‘A Serious Man’ – New York Times article about the Jewish background of the Coen brothers

‘Serious Man’ Actor Laughs at Darkness – CNN interview with star Micheal Stuhlbarh

Taking It Seriously – “Tablet” article by author Liel Leibovitz arguing that A Serious Man is a “masterful meditation on Judaism”

DVD INFO: The Universal DVD (buy) contains no commentary track (the Coens seldom provide commentaries, and even notoriously provided a fake commentary track for Blood Simple). Besides the film, the DVD contains three short featurettes: the 17 minute “Becoming Serious,” a general “making of” documentary; “Creating 1967,” describing the production design; and the amusing “Hebrew and Yiddish for Goys,” a sort of pop-up glossary for the film defining some of the obscure Jewish terminology. The movie is also available on Blu-ray (buy).

DIRECTED BY: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

FEATURING: Michael Stubargh, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Fyvush Finkel

PLOT: A putzy Jewish physics professor suffers from an escalating series of problems

including a failing marriage, bratty kids, students willing to do anything for a passing grade, financial troubles, and a ne’er-do-well, mildly insane brother.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE:  While the early leader for Weirdest Movie of 2009, A Serious Man won’t be eligible to be officially added to the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies of All Time until it receives its DVD release and the film can be pored over meticulously by our team of critics.  Okay, to be honest, the home video release requirement is a way to buy time, while I let the Coens’ latest ferment in the back cellar of my consciousness.  The conundrum is that, superficially, this movie is not that weird; there are a few dream sequences and nonsense parables, but unlike the Coens definitely weird Barton Fink, this story of a suburban Jewish man beset by an improbably mounting set of real life woes contains no surrealistic fireworks (although there is a conspicuous surrealistic pillow).  On the other hand, this movie has a skeletal undercurrent of  ambiguity and disturbance running through it like a bone cancer; it feels weird at its core.  Also, the way it’s currently unsettling and outraging square moviegoers points to a powerfully different movie.

COMMENTS:  A Serious Man is a retelling of that most fascinating parable in the Old Testament, the Book of Job, as a postmodern absurdist comedy.  The ancient Job was a good and prosperous man; God allowed Satan to test his faith by wiping out his flocks, killing his children, and smiting him with boils.  The beleaguered Job, bothered by visits from three unhelpful friends who try to console him with off-base theological speculations, eventually despairs, but never doubts God’s existence or goodness.  His only plea is to understand his misfortune, to be able to ask God directly, “Why me?”  God, appearing in a whirlwind, bitchslaps Job for his audacity: “who are you to question me, the Author of the Universe?  It’s your job to obey and suffer in silence.”  (I’m paraphrasing here).  After this reproof, God restores Job’s riches and lets him have new children to replace the ones Satan killed.  The author of the book even makes a point to remark that Job’s three new daughters are much hotter than the ones He let get iced.

The Coen’s Professor Gopnik is a more complex and human creation, and definitely a funnier one, than the symbolic Job of the Old Testament.  His suburban troubles are minor league compared to the pestilences Job suffered, but they’re easier to relate to: domestic troubles; bratty kids; oppressive legal bills; anonymous letters unfairly smearing his morals; persistent calls from the Columbia record club; and a layabout, unemployable brother living on his couch who spends most of his time in the bathroom draining his cyst.  The ex-friend who’s stealing his wife from him—himself a serious man—is insufferably and hilariously unctuous. He adds multiple insults to Gropnik’s injury, giving him bottles of fine wine and big bear hugs as he consoles the loser and calmly designs new sleeping arrangements for the trio.  Gropnik’s troubles mount and pile up on one another until he’s losing his mind, when, in desperation, he seeks help from three rabbis, each more obtuse and less helpful than the last.

Gropnik’s frustrated reactions to the absurd plagues that smite him, the indignities he suffers and the impractical advice he gets, are wickedly funny.  Not only is the film funny, but it’s also firmly lodged in a lovingly textured, real universe: a Jewish suburban community in conservative Minnesota in 1967.  One thing’s certain: this film is so dripping with Judaica, you’ll feel ready to be mitzvahed after just one viewing.

Although we sympathize with Gopnik for his bad luck, he’s more complicated than good guy Job, because he’s such a passive figure.  Sure, he’s a family man who observes Sabbath and sends his kids to Hebrew school, but is this enough to make him a serious man?  We have to wonder whether his son would place an emergency call to him at his divorce lawyer’s office to ask him to adjust the TV antenna, or whether his wife would be so anxious to leave him for a more serious man, or if he would have gotten in so much trouble with the exchange student who’s trying to bribe him for a passing grade, if he were more assertive.  He’s a harmless man who suffers more than he deserves, but might he have brought many of his troubles on himself?  He seeks advice and waits for other people to solve his problems for him—even, perhaps, waiting for God to intervene—but could this failure to seize his own destiny be one of the sources of his multiple heartaches?

A seemingly unrelated story opens the film, a chilling fireside tale set in an Eastern European Jewish community about an old man who may or may not be a dybbuk (ghost).  The significance of this opening scene is debatable, but more than anything it seems to relate to the “well of Jewish tradition” the movie explicitly calls on as a way to understand suffering.  And one of the main features of Jewish wisdom, at least as the Coens present it, is that it’s a tradition that recognizes and even embraces ambiguity and mystery.  These stories the Jews tell each other over and over through the ages remind them that they can’t know God’s mind, but must go on and be faithful nonetheless.  The second rabbi’s hilariously absurd and seemingly pointless story about the Jewish dentist who finds a message from God on a goy’s teeth hammers that point home.  The movie begins with the rabbinical epigraph “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.”  “Accept the mystery,” counsels another character in the middle of the film (in a deliciously mysterious twist, he delivers this advice like a vessel of God, without actually understanding what he is saying).

There is a fascinating contrast between that opening scene and the rest of the movie: despite the fact that we don’t know if the visitor is a dybbuk or not, the peasant’s wife does.  Whether she’s right or wrong about his demonic heritage, she acts, decisively and irreversibly, in a way that her timid modern successor, Gropnik, never could.  Right or wrong, her act belongs to her; if she suffers misfortune for her deed, there will be no question why.

It was a simpler time back in the shetl.  Gropnik, a physicist, has bewildered himself by probing deeply into quantum mechanics and the uncertainty at the base of the subatomic particle.  It was a stroke of genius for the Coens to make their Job a physics professor, because, like Judaism, modern physics has its own set of inscrutable parables.  When a student claims to understand the notoriously difficult paradox of Schrödinger’s half-alive, half-dead cat, an annoyed Gropnik shoots back “even I don’t understand the cat.”  But the prof emphasizes that the math behind the paradox works, and that’s what’s important.  In physics, at least, he receives with simplicity what happens.  That proves to be a harder lesson to apply in real life.

The ending to A Serious Man is already notoriously divisive; some hail it as brilliant, others see it as a cheat, the act of filmmakers without a clue how to end their own story, who just snap the camera off on a cliffhanger.  I don’t mind endings that are ambiguous or inconclusive—I adore them when well done—but I have to agree with the detractors that A Serious Man‘s ending is too abrupt.  A mysterious image that implies more than it says is a fine thing to end a film on, but the audience should have a chance to savor a building climax before the rug is suddenly pulled out from under them at a seemingly random point.  The Coens’ own Barton Fink ended on an even more mystifying note than this one, but that startling image came in an epilogue, after Barton’s final act had already been resolved in our minds.  The scene was a weird cherry on top, not the entire dessert.

A Serious Man‘s final image is exceedingly clever when we remember that this is a retelling of the Book of Job.  The Coens remember their source, but have deliberately decided to end their tale just before the resolution of the Wisdom book, without giving a comforting answer to the misery but without irreversibly shutting the door, either.  That ambiguous ending is thematically consistent in a movie that insists that we can never understand our own suffering from the inside.  Prospects look bleak for Gropnik, but we don’t know for sure what happens to him or his family; perhaps he reconciles with his wife and she births him three more daughters, each hotter than his current nose-job seeking brat.  But that cleverness doesn’t make us any more satisfied when the scene suddenly cuts to black.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“As weird inconveniences spiral into operatic miseries, Larry dutifully searches for clues, answers, signs. He talks to learned rabbis and listens to recordings of famous cantors. What he encounters, apart from haunting music and drab suburban sacred architecture, is silence, nonsense and — from that metaphysical zone beyond the screen, where the rest of us sit and watch — laughter.”–A.O. Scott, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“If Philip Roth and Franz Kafka sat down to write an adaptation of the Book of Job, the result might be something like ‘A Serious Man’…”–Alsonso Duralde, MSNBC (contemporaneous)

“The movie raises more questions about the Coens’ storytelling depth and competence than it does about suffering and faith…  ‘A Serious Man’ has the cramped intensity of a mid-period Ingmar Bergman movie remade by a couple of secular-Jewish comedians.”–Michael Sragow, The Baltimore Sun (contemporaneous)