A Serious Man

[This is an attempt to interpret the complex narrative of the movie. Please read this *after* you've watched the movie - else skip to the last line :)]

Larry Gopnik is a professor of physics who teaches his students about 'Schrodinger's Cat' - the idea that the fate of an entity remains undefined right until the moment an agent acts and 'collapses the wave function,' so to speak. Gopnik believes that the story of the cat serves no purpose other than to illustrate a mathematical truth - and yet, strangely enough, Gopnik's human fate is no less uncertain and contingent than that of Schrodinger's hypothetical cat. For example, the very moment Gopnik "acts" to accept a bribe and pass his Korean student, his telephone rings, and he receives ominous news from his doctor. By this time, the strange causalities in the movie will have compelled us to ask if Gopnik's phone would have rung had he chosen differently. As Gopnik comes to realize, the "truth" of mathematics and numbers - be it in the form of Physics, the Mentaculus, or the Kabbalah - is beside the point. What is of essence is the human story.

To be sure, ASM is not an amoral thought experiment about actions determining outcomes. The movie takes a very specific moral position: "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you." If you willfully "act" in defiance of your fate, you will reap the consequences of your actions.

Gopnik is a man who almost never acts. As Michael Wood points out in his LRB review, Gopnik lives in a world where "agency always belongs to someone else." Agency belongs to Sy, to the wife, to the son, and even to the Columbia Record club that makes you pay for taking no action at all. On the few occasions that Gopnik chooses to act, he meets with disaster. His refusal to accept his neighbor's encroachments into his property culminates in the bizarre death of a lawyer. His "road rage" - brought on by the sight of the Korean student - causes him to lose control of his vehicle and, via some twisted Schrodingerian logic, "cause" the death of Sy Ableman. Finally, Gopnik's refusal to accept the burden of his own legal expenses brings down a grave illness upon him. The moral of this tale seems to be: there is less suffering in passively accepting one's fate than in actively meddling with it - a credo of inaction, similar to the Christian doctrine of quietism and the more ascetic interpretations of Karma.

And yet there is a delicious ambiguity concerning the theological foundation of this ethical vision. When Rabbi Marshak speaks to Danny, we wonder if we are hearing the settled wisdom of an ancient tradition, or the contemporary wisdom of a serious man who has just "received with simplicity" the truthless truth of The Airplane. Marshak's chamber, interestingly, looks more like the study of an amateur biologist, than that of a religious cleric.

ASM embodies the Judaic vision of tradition as a repository of stories. It has a "Russian Doll" structure - a story within a story, where the outer story echoes the inner one. What the dentist Sussman's story is to Gopnik, Gopnik's story is to us. Just like Gopnik, Sussman too is a "serious man" coping with a crisis that has turned his life upside down. Such stories - which constitute the tradition - acquire significance through signs and tokens whose obscurity invites interpretation. The teeth in Sussman's story are referenced in Gopnik's story - we see a large model of teeth in Rabbi Marshak's chamber. And very mischievously, the background score chosen for the Sussman narrative is by Jimi Hendrix - a man famous for expressing himself with his teeth! "What does it mean?" Sussman asks the Rabbi, awaiting a revelation. The Rabbi is honest enough to admit his cluelessness - and so the mystery remains - only to be transmitted to Gopnik, and then to us - the last hearers of the story. Just like Gopnik, we too are addressees of the message that drove Sussman crazy. We too restlessly await an epiphany that will abolish the mystery.

At one level, this is a story about a father, a son, and the transmission of tradition. Note the parallel between Danny's Bar Mitzvah and Gopnik's tenure - the rites of passage father and son have to undergo. Our anxious wait ends with a "mazel tov" for both of them. The "rite of passage" theme is similarly evoked by the intense and purposeful neighbor who, determined to make a man out of his pre-adolescent son, inducts him into the violent sport of hunting.

The narrative has a beautiful circularity. When the story begins, the father is talking to his doctor and the son is in the classroom pondering a debt he owes. When it ends, the father is still talking to the doctor and the son is still in the classroom, except that now the clouds are gathering, and some great judgment is hand. The father makes his choice and condemns himself; the son dithers as the tornado approaches.

Thanks to Coen Brothers' attention to detail, one chances upon new significances in every subsequent viewing. The Rabbi Nachtner sequence stands on its own as a stunning reminder of the Coen Brothers' mastery of their medium. The actors deliver stellar performances - Stuhlbarg creates magic with his face and his voice. The crouched, defensive man who negotiates with the Columbia Record club could not be more different from the tenured professor who is about to change Clive's grade. And as we have come to expect from the Coen brothers, characters tend to have comical tics. There's Gopnik's wife's rapid blinking when she is agitated; Sy's tendency to say "most important" in his mellifluous voice; and of course, the kid in the bus who has just discovered the joy of expletives.

To call this movie a masterpiece would be to state the obvious. This is the Coen brothers' subtlest and most cerebral work yet. It is a serious work of art.

What makes this wry comedy special isn't the humour. Although you'll have a smile on your face much of the time (certainly not at the ending), there were only a couple of laugh out loud moments. Rather, it's the thought-provoking and stimulating storyline about a Jewish college professor, Larry Gopnik, whose life seems to be unraveling, and who seeks spiritual guidance in vain.

His wife is leaving him for another man. His psychologically impaired brother has moved in, stirring up even more domestic turmoil. He is up for tenure but someone has been sending anonymous letters of complaint about him to university officials. He has to deal with a difficult Korean student, and the student's father, who offer to bribe him in exchange for a passing grade. And he has money problems.

Gopnik comes across as something of a pathetic sap who could solve some of his problems by just standing up for himself, but his ultimate fate is apparently beyond his control. The ending could have been written by Schopenhauer. Even though I don't agree with, or like, the movie's message, I still respect and admire the way it has been put on film.

Aside from the fact that it probably helps to be Jewish (I'm not) when digesting the film, the only problem I have with it is that I kept waiting in vain to find out the significance of the film's beginning: a supernatural(?) scene in what appears to be 19h century Poland. I don't know if I missed it, but I was unable to see any connection between this opening and the rest of the movie.

With all the garbage that is churned out by Hollywood nowadays, A SERIOUS MAN is a real gem of a flick, albeit an ultimately depressing one.

Yes, it's not for everyone. A strong grasp of both Jewish tradition and quantum physics would do the potential viewer well in getting the absolute most out of the film. But, as someone who is by no means an expert in either area, this one hit me on quite a base level in its unflinching and very true-to-life depiction of a man's life coming apart at the seams and all the existential angst that ensues. The wonderful thing is, A Serious Man is not only deeply resonant and moving, but quite hilarious as well- in that dark, dark way that may be just a little too dark for some.

The Coens have always caught some flack for their supposed misanthropic elitism; or, in other words, what has been seen by some critics as a sort of contemptuous mocking of the characters they depict onscreen, the two directors never fully granting their filmic creations emotional sympathy. If it was previously easy to debunk this claim, it is now, with A Serious Man, a piece of cake. Has there been a performance in recent years more gut-wrenchingly honest and genuinely pathos-exuding than Michael Stuhlbarg here as protagonist Larry Gopnik? That the narrative thrust of the film is essentially centered around all the horrifying and humiliating events that befall Gopnik does not necessarily mean that the Coens thumb their noses down at this character. If we take into consideration the personal nature of the film (set in a time and place very much like when/where they grew up, and populated by characters probably not unlike those they knew), then it comes as no surprise that A Serious Man is the most studied and 'serious' Coen brothers film to date.

Simply in terms of sheer film-making craft, this is the Coens, and certainly cinematographer Roger Deakins, at the peak of their respective crafts. The recreation of a late 60's heavily Jewish Midwestern locale is pitch-perfect (minus a few very small anachronisms). Not a scene feels wasted, not a shot superfluous; the picture is beautifully symmetric in structure and full of little rhymes and rhythms and repetitions, plenty striking and quasi-iconic images (Stuhlbarg on the roof as pictured on the DVD and promotional poster being one of many), and lots of likely soon-to-be classic dialogue infused with both the Coens' trademark deadpan humor (a la The Big Lebowski) as well as the film's broader thematic concerns.

Then there's the ending, or perhaps as some would say, lack thereof. Not unlike the ambiguous note that No Country For Old Men went out on, the final moments of A Serious Man will probably leave many angered, many confused, and many disappointed. But I don't think there was any other way to close such a film, one largely concerned, as it is, with all the great uncertainties that plague life-- what more appropriate way to end it than with the greatest cinematic uncertainty of all? The final shot is, I think, one of the most haunting in cinema history. I've seen the film three times in the theater, each time leaving awestruck and emotionally drained as the various events of the film, its haunting score and its devastating philosophical implications swirl around my head.

A Serious Man, then, is truly a serious film, with the (black) humor only arising naturally from the utter tragic unfair-ness of life as seen through the protagonist's eyes, and not forced on the situations irreverently as in a lot of films. Given the uncompromisingly bleak nature of the film, perhaps it's best summed up by an old and rather cliché platitude (not unlike the one the film somewhat ironically opens with): When you feel like crying, laugh instead.