Coens’ A Serious Man suffused with Jewishness

TORONTO — Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man is their most personal feature film to date. Premièred at the Toronto International Film Festival, and scheduled to open here on Oct. 16, it unfolds in the   U.S. Midwest in 1967 and turns on a Jewish physics professor whose life implodes in a matter of weeks. (with video)

Michael Stuhlbarg plays the lead role in A Serious Man.

Joel
and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man is their most personal feature film to
date. Premièred at the Toronto International Film Festival, and
scheduled to open here on Oct. 16, it unfolds in the   U.S. Midwest in 1967 and turns on a Jewish physics professor whose life implodes in a matter of weeks. 

Michael Stuhlbarg plays the lead role in A Serious Man.

There are parallels here with the Coens’ biography that are striking. They were born in a suburb of Minneapolis, raised in a Jewish family, came of age in the late 1960s and are the sons of university professors.

Compared to some of their previous films, such as Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Fargo and even Barton Fink, A Serious Man is suffused with a deep spirit of Jewishness.


The Gopniks, the family around which the 105-minute film revolves, are unabashedly Jewish. The central character, Larry Gopnik, consults three rabbis as his problems pile up. There are direct references to the Torah, the Kabbalah, “mixers” at Hillel, “goys” and anti-Semitism, and the soundtrack resounds to both Yiddish and Hebrew.

The Jewish tone is established in the first scene, which takes place in a shtetl in the old country, probably Russia, in the waning decades of the 19th century or in the early 20th century.

A rabbi, supposedly deceased, visits a couple conversing in Yiddish. They are bundled up in layers of clothes to ward off the cold of winter. Is the  rabbi real or merely an apparition? He may be a dybbuk, come to enlighten the couple.

The film fast forwards to an infectious pop song, Somebody to Love, as performed by the Jefferson Airplane, and then segues to a Hebrew class and a doctors’ examining room in America.

At this point, the Coens get down to  real business as the camera pans on a cookie-cutter suburb devoid of trees.

Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a reticent professor, is jolted to learn that his wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), plans to leave him. She demands a get, a Jewish divorce. Her paramour, Sy Abelman (Fred Melamed), is an educated, well-spoken widower to whom she has gotten “very close.”

Gopnik’s reaction is one of resignation rather than indignation or rage. Stranger still, he accepts Abelman’s soothing but outrageous suggestion that he and his unemployed brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), should move out of the  family house and decamp in a local motel so that he and Judith can live together happily ever after as lovers.

Judith’s bombshell is merely one of Gopnik’s problems. An anonymous letter writer is trying to sabotage his chances for tenure, and a disgruntled student with a heavy Korean accent attempts to bride him for a passing grade. The student’s menacing father threatens Gopnik if he refuses to comply.

Gopnik, whose health takes a sudden turn for the worse, is also having trouble controlling his son, a slacker at school, and his daughter, a Jewish princess who’s lifting money from his wallet to pay for a future nose job.

The Coen brothers direct these scenes with aplomb, managing to inject appropriate doses of sardonic humour into the proceedings.

Gopnik’s travails prompt him to consult several rabbis, but they are of little or no use to him. Try as they might, they cannot tell him why a serious man like himself – a mensch, really – is so besieged and bewildered by troubles.

The film barrels along at a steady clip, never tripping up on its subplots,  and it is authentic in terms of the picture it paints of a modern, secular middle-class Jewish family in the United States in the last third of the 20th century.

Terrifically atmospheric, it conveys  authenticity by panning on such minor details as a book by Abba Eban, Israel’s foreign minister at the time, and photographs of solemn rabbis.

But ultimately, it is the calibre of the acting that elevates A Serious Man into a satisfying  experience.

Stuhlbarg, a virtual unknown, is a wonder as a befuddled man embroiled in a mounting crisis. Melamed is pitch perfect as a soft-spoken hypocrite and backstabber, while Lennick is just so right as a wife who is dumping her husband for no apparent reason.

As a portrait of an individual who cannot make sense of his unravelling life, A Serious Man is an accomplishment. Indeed, it is the Coens’ finest film in years.