Review: A Serious Man

[angelophile]

Last night I settled down to watch the Coen Brothers' latest flick - A Serious Man is being touted as their most "personal" film, with its vision of a suburban Jewish community in Minnesota in the late sixties. Physics teacher Larry Gopnik teaches Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, declaring that "we can never know what's going on." That's rather how I felt throughout this movie as, after an apparently unconnected preface set in a Polish shtetl and played in subtitled Yiddish about what may or may not be a dybbuk, we entered Larry's life, where his home life immediately starts to fall apart - his wife plans to leave him for another man; someone has maligned him in anonymous messages to his school's tenure committee; a Korean student is trying to bribe him; his brother's set up permanent residence in his bathroom and his kids are too self-absorbed to care about anything but pot, TV and a nose job. And then things just start to get worse...

The trouble is, the Coens have definitely lost their heart. Burn After Reading was directionless, cynical, even smug, with no sympathetic core - in Fargo or The Big Lebowski, the characters might be losers, but they're sympathetic losers nonetheless. In their recent movies, the Coens have continued to demonstrate they're masters at the art of film making, but they're producing empty movies with empty characters - there's no emotional core to hold onto.

The central character here is not a lovable schmuck, he's just a passive schmuck, dumped on by life at every turn and, apparently, doing nothing to address it. The best scene in the movie is a meandering parable, at the end of which the central character is left wondering what the point of it was. Which was my reaction at the end of the movie. I imagine that was the Coen's intent, but there's so little to enjoy in the process, so few moments of humanity, it's all so deeply unsentimental and forgiving. There's a hole in the middle of the movie where the empathy should be.

There's also plenty to admire in Roger Deakins's camerawork, Carter Burwell's score and the Coens' editing, the smartness of the script and the performances of all the cast, but the lack of humanity both of and towards the characters makes this a bleak experience. I left too detached to care what happens to anyone, not even the central character, who never developed a character of his own. He just barely reacts and occasionally has a mild bout of controlled hysteria. It's telling that the one single scene in the movie which had an ounce of humanity or sentiment ends with a character getting shot in the back of the head. It feels nasty and pointlessly vindictive, like intellectual torture porn.

And the end of the day, it just felt like the Coens spent a lot of time thinking about their movie making craft from a technical and intellectual standpoint and satirizing their upbringing by littering the movie with nearly hateful racial (if not racist) stereotypes, but very little thinking about whether the audience would enjoy the experience as much as they did. Reception's been positive from critics, though, so maybe I'm wrong. But, you know, this one just sailed on past me and the only emotion I felt was frustration.