Larry Gopnik is having a bad day. This quiet, more than slightly nebbish physics professor's ordinary life is disrupted in an afternoon by a student who tries to bribe him in a failed attempt to raise his midterm grade (later the student tries extortion), he gets into a property line dispute with his goy neighbor, and his wife Judith (Sari Lennik) reveals that she's been seeing a close friend on the sly and wants a divorce. Plus, his tenure request is endangered by a series of anonymous letters besmirching his character that keep on arriving to members of the tenure board, and the Columbia Record Club is hounding him for payment on a subscription that his son secretly took out in his name. More bad things happen in the following days, including several sudden deaths, but you get the point. In the midst of this Larry, an observant Jew, wonders where Hashem (the Hebrew word used to refer to God in informal conversation) is in all this madness and confusion. Does life have meaning, or is everything that happens to us the product of random chance? The rabbis he consults don't seem to know the answer, and one even tells him that Hashem owes him no answer, even though he plants the curiosity within us from the start. As Larry frustratingly muses, if he gives us the question, why won't he give us the answer?
This is the set up for the Coen Brothers 2009 offering A Serious Man. The film is set in an Upper Midwest, mostly Jewish suburb in 1967. It's based on Joel and Ethan Coen's own childhood neighborhood in Minnesota, and while the late 60's setting is somewhat superfluous, except to make certain gags possible, it does add to the atmosphere. Though the film asks serious questions about God and fate, taking a critical view on the existance of a providential God and the ability of religion to answer the deeper questions of life's meaning, it's an affectionate, and often funny look at what it was like to grow up Jewish (albeit in the Coen Brother's dark style).
A Serious Man is billed as a modern retelling of the Book of Job, but the only thing the main character, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), has in common with his Biblical counter part is that bad things start happening to him, seemingly out of nowhere, and he wonders where God is in all the suffering. The difference is that Job was a serious man of property and wealth who lost it all, and got it all back, and then some, after his time of trial was over. If we are honest in reading Job we are left with more questions than answers, even if the Divine author wraps everything up neatly at the end. Here, Gopnik is an every-man who schleps his way through life, contently enough, to find himself suddenly confronted with calamities that thrown him for an existential loop, forcing him to questions the meaning of life and faith. When things begin to turn around for the better real problems seem to be barreling down just as the film is ending. We are left with the same questions as Job, only without the pretty bow and with a dose of palpable dread.
This isn't an easy movie to follow, especially since there really isn't a driving, clearly focused plot, and scenes are inserted that don't seem to be serving the story, such as there is. This doesn't mean that these bits don't work, because they do; especially a bizarre Yiddish language prologue about a suspected ghost that takes place in another century and location. Then there's the story of the dentist and goy's teeth; very funny but still leaves you scratching your head as to why we took the detour. But the scenes themselves work, especially the one about the goy's teeth, in so far as they highlight the idea that life itself is a movie without a plot and the more you try to tease one out the more frustrated you will get.
What I saw as a key to understanding the movie was an encounter at the end of the film between Larry's son Danny (Aaron Wolf) and the aged Rabbi Marshak (Alan Mandell). It is the boy's Bar Mitzvah day and he goes into the old sages cluttered and slightly spooky office to be congratulated. Featured prominently amid all sorts of strange scientific specimens in jars and random bric a brac is a copy of Caravaggio's Sacrifice of Issac, depicting another biblical story that makes one question what God's up to. As he sits nervously, the grizzled and wizened wise man begins to slowly paraphrase the opening lines to a Jefferson Airplane song popular at the time:
"When the truth is found to be lies,
And all the hope within you dies,
then what?"
This is the key question of the movie, even if Larry hasn't come to see the answers offered by faith to be lies yet. The Rabbi Nachtner (perfectly played by George Wyner), who Larry consults after an unsatisfying sit down with the "junior" rabbi, can only tell him how God doesn't work as opposed to how he actually does (a later funeral scene shows that he doesn't have a grip on what the afterlife is about either). He dismisses questions of ultimate meaning as annoying tooth aches that will go away with time. For his part, Marshak, like the other rabbis, offers no answers, just the grandfatherly admonition to "be a good boy," as he returns the boy's transistor radio that had been confiscated by the Hebrew teacher at the beginning of the movie. But where does one go when the basic assumptions that guide our life don't seem to be valid anymore?
In the end A Serious Man leaves us with questions, and no answers. When what we were raised to believe doesn't seem to match up with the realities of life, what do we do? Do we give in to hopelessness? Obviously the Christian answer is no; life has a purpose and their is a plan even if we can't figure it out in our own time. But I don't want to dismiss the questions, because, while God gives us more to work with than Rabbi Nachtner gives him credit for, he does leave plenty of room for mystery, wonder and questioning. There isn't a person who hasn't had to grapple with these questions at one time or another, including great saints of strong faith. The Coen Brothers make us grapple with them with humor, irony but also with a clear sense of appreciation for the religious and cultural tradition they were raised in, even if they are unsure how they view its deeper implications.
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