Coen Brothers' 'A Serious Man': super study of a seriously sensational shlemiel

It is said that a shlemiel is the guy who buys a suit with two pairs of pants and burns a hole in the coat.

But Larry Gopnik, the serious hero of "A Serious Man," is no shlemiel.

It is better said that a shlemiel is the man at a formal dinner party who spills his soup on the man next to him -- and that a shlimaazel is the guy he spills it on. 

The newest, and perhaps strangest, film from Oscar-winning writer-directors Joel and Ethan Coen is a Jewish shaggy dog story of one man's desperate search for clarity in a foggy universe with near-zero visibility. As such, it's a brilliantly black-comic parable plumbing the depths of mortality and immortality, with Jefferson Airplane supplying the unlikely soundtrack and un-Judaic brackets to their parable.

In the year of our lord -- actually, "their" lord -- 1967, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a nerdy-but-nice Midwestern Jewish physics professor, a shoo-in for tenure. Oh, sure, he's got a problem or two at home, where his unemployed brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is sleeping on the couch and monopolizing the bathroom, to the great annoyance of his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) and his kids from hell, or at least purgatory, which Jews don't believe in: Shirker son Danny (Aaron Wolff) listens to rock in Hebrew class through an earplug hooked to his transistor radio and does his bar mitzvah totally stoned. Daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) does nothing but kvetch, wash her hair, and steal money from Larry's wallet for a nose job.

The tale opens with an eerie Yiddish prologue set in an ancient Polish shtetl, where an old man does a good deed for a villager in distress and is invited home for soup. There, the no-nonsense wife insists her husband's rescuer is a dybbuk -- a kind of zombie possessed by an evil spirit, who will bring a curse on them (and their descendants?).

Indeed, some sort of curse, or plain old bad luck, seems visited upon Larry, whose life starts rapidly falling apart. Judith suddenly announces she is leaving him for their friend Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), a monumentally self-satisfied widower, who strikes her as much more substantial than Larry -- about 150 pounds more substantial. Sy hugs and consoles Larry with all the cliched, feel-good reassurances of the period -- gently suggesting Larry move out (to the Jolly Roger Motel) so that Sy can move in.

Meanwhile, an anonymous letter writer is trying to sabotage Larry's tenure with allegations of moral turpitude. A Korean student named Clive (David Kang) tries to bribe him for a passing grade, while Clive's father simultaneously threatens to sue him for defamation. Larry's next-door neighbor (Amy Landecker) -- a cross between Mrs. Robinson and Bill Cardille's Terminal Stare -- torments him by sunbathing nude; his menacing goy neighbors on the other side infringe on his property line; and Dick Dutton from the Columbia Record Club keeps dunning him for albums he never ordered.

It's more than a little tsuris and it's driving Larry literally to distraction, stuck as he is at the Jolly Roger with Arthur (who is tethered to a portable suction unit that constantly drains a sebaceous cyst on his neck). In dire need of emotional and existential insight, Larry gets precious little from the various rabbis he consults -- although one of them tells him the profound story of a goy whose Jewish dentist discovered the cryptic message "Help me, save me" in Hebrew letters on the man's lower teeth.

Terrific performances abound from a cast of unknowns. Stuhlbarg's Larry is a perfect cross between Buck Henry and Wally Cox. Lennick's Judith is every Jewish or Gentile husband's nightmare. Melamed's insufferable Sy steals the show. Ari Hoptman as Larry's tenure committee chairman is hilarious, as is Kang's conniving Clive.

There must be something in the water of suburban Minneapolis that spawns and nurtures the likes of Garrison Keillor (whose Guy Noir likewise asks "life's persistent questions"), the Coen brothers and local actors Lennick, McManus and Wolff.

In the Coens' ironic worl view, the Chosen People were chosen -- for what? For smoting. "Why me, Lord?" Job is the quintessential shlimaazel, and this is a modern rethinking of the Book of Job at a time where Hashem is even more incomprehensible than he was 5,000 years ago. Far from anti-Jewish, it is oddly respectful in the end: Danny does learn his Torah; Larry listens to the great cantors' recordings -- and remains a good man while God plays hide-and-seek and always wins by staying hidden.

With their usual precision, the Coens deftly alternate story threads -- and red herrings -- that may or may not come together at the end. As for metaphysical meaning-of-life speculation? In one of "A Serious Man's" best scenes, Larry attempts to explain to his students the equation for the root mean square deviation of momentum in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics.

Uncertainty, for sure. That, plus the film's stupendous final image and inspired music, suggests that the key to the universe -- at least, this universe -- is really slick.

 

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