From Coen Brothers, Calls to God and Always a Busy Signal - The...

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/movies/02serious.html

MOVIE REVIEW | 'A SERIOUS MAN'

Calls to God: Always a Busy Signal

A Serious Man
Comedy, Drama

NYT Critics Pick

R

By A. O. SCOTT

Directed by Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

1h 46m
OCT. 1, 2009

Did you hear the one about the guy who lived in the land of Uz, who was
perfect and upright and feared God? His name was Job. In the new
movie version, A Serious Man, some details have been changed. Hes
called Larry Gopnik and he lives in Minnesota, where he teaches physics
at a university. When we first meet Larry, in the spring of 1967, his
tenure case is pending, his sons bar mitzvah is approaching, and, as in
the original, a lot of bad stuff is about to happen, for no apparent reason.
At work, Larry specializes in topics like Schrdingers Paradox and
the Heisenberg Principle complex and esoteric ideas that can be
summarized by the layman, more or less, as God knows. Because we
cant. Though if he does, he isnt saying much.
Larry, played with poignant, brow-furrowed deadpan by Michael
Stuhlbarg, does not exactly fear the divinity whom he, like other devout
Jews, calls Hashem (the name in Hebrew). Its more that hes puzzled,
beleaguered, perplexed. What does God want from us? What should we
expect from him? As weird inconveniences spiral into operatic miseries,

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1/9/17, 4:52 PM

From Coen Brothers, Calls to God and Always a Busy Signal - The...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/movies/02serious.html

Larry dutifully searches for clues, answers, signs. He talks to learned

rabbis and listens to recordings of famous cantors. What he encounters,
apart from haunting music and drab suburban sacred architecture, is
silence, nonsense and from that metaphysical zone beyond the screen,
where the rest of us sit and watch laughter.
How odd of God goes an old bit of doggerel to choose the Jews.
And how perversely fitting that Joel and Ethan Coen, who wrote and
directed A Serious Man, should elect to examine the deep peculiarity
and calamitous consequences of this choice. The vein of fatalistic,
skeptical humor that runs through so many of their movies has
frequently had a Jewish inflection, both cultural and metaphysical.
Here, that inheritance, glancingly present in movies like Barton Fink
and The Big Lebowski, is, so to speak, the whole megillah.
A Serious Man begins with a narrow-screen, Yiddish-language
dramatization of an ersatz folk tale about a tzadik (Fyvush Finkel) who
may or may not be a dybbuk. (A righteous man who might be a ghost.
You see how much is lost in translation?)
The story is at once hilarious and horrific, its significance both
self-evident and opaque. The same could be said of most of the Coen
brothers movies, in which human existence and the attempt to find
meaning in it are equally futile, if also sometimes a lot of fun. (For us, at
least.) Their insistence on the fundamental absence of a controlling
order in the universe is matched among American filmmakers only by
Woody Allen. The crucial difference is that the Coens are compulsive,
rigorous formalists, as if they were trying in the same gesture to expose,
and compensate for, the meaninglessness of life.
So a question put before the congregation by A Serious Man is
whether it makes the case for atheism or looks at the world from a divine
point of view. Are the Coens mocking God, playing God or taking his side
in a rigged cosmic game? Whats the difference?
The philosophical conundrums in A Serious Man can be posed

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1/9/17, 4:52 PM

From Coen Brothers, Calls to God and Always a Busy Signal - The...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/movies/02serious.html

only in jest or, at least, in the cultural tradition of Ashkenazic Judaism

that stretches from the shtetls of Poland to the comedy clubs of the
Catskills, that is how they tend to be posed. But a deep anxiety lurks
beneath the jokes, and though A Serious Man is written and structured
like a farce, it is shot (by Roger Deakins), scored (by Carter Burwell) and
edited (by the Coens pseudonymous golem Roderick Jaynes) like a
horror movie.
Everything that happens to Larry takes on a sinister cast. A student
(David Kang) protests an unjust grade and tries to bribe him. Someone
is sending letters to the tenure committee smearing Larrys good name,
while the Columbia Record Club peppers him with dunning calls. His
brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), at work on a mad mystico-mathematical
text that will unlock the secrets of the cosmos, has moved into Larrys
ranch-style house, taking his physical and mental health issues with him.
And in that house there is sibling warfare (between the bar mitzvah
boy, played by Aaron Wolff, and his older sister, played by Jessica
McManus), poor reception on the television and, all of a sudden, a
collapsed marriage. Larrys wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), has taken up
with an older widower named Sy Ableman (the splendidly unctuous Fred
Melamed) allegory, anyone? who pompously lays claim to the
movies title role.
Forget plot summary, though. A Serious Man, like No Country for
Old Men and Burn After Reading, is fundamentally a shaggy dog
story. But while it is funnier than either of those movies, it also has more
gravity to it. This is not just because it represents something of a
homecoming for the brothers, who grew up in the heavily Jewish
Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park in the 1960s. They are hardly the
kind to be sentimental about the old neighborhood. But in that milieu
their smart-alecky nihilism feels authentic rather than arch you
understand, maybe for the first time, where they are coming from.
A Serious Man continues their nonsequential, decade-by-decade,

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1/9/17, 4:52 PM

From Coen Brothers, Calls to God and Always a Busy Signal - The...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/movies/02serious.html

movie-guided tour of American history. And, as usual, a lot of history is

left off screen: the 60s is pot, the Jefferson Airplane and a slight shift in
attitudes toward what Judith calls whoopsie-doopsie. But if they are
diffident about the politics of the time or perhaps just cleverly oblique
their sociological sense is unusually acute, if also exaggerated. Apart
from a Korean student and an unfriendly neighbor, Larry lives
surrounded by his own kind: lawyers, dentists, doctors, colleagues, a
too-friendly neighbor. His world is a suburban shtetl on the edge of the
prairie.
And the local details are, in the end, incidental. A Serious Man is,
like its biblical source, a distilled, hyperbolic account of the human
condition. The punch line is a little different, but you know the joke. And
its on you, of course.
A Serious Man is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying
parent or adult guardian). It has drug use, swearing and the repeated
violation of Commandments 3, 5 and 7 to 10.
A SERIOUS MAN
Opens on Friday nationwide.
Written, produced and directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen;
director of photography, Roger Deakins; edited by Roderick Jaynes;
music by Carter Burwell; production designer, Jess Gonchor; released
by Focus Features. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.
WITH: Michael Stuhlbarg (Larry Gopnik), Richard Kind (Uncle
Arthur), Fred Melamed (Sy Ableman), Sari Lennick (Judith Gopnik),
Adam Arkin (Divorce Lawyer), Aaron Wolff (Danny Gopnik), Jessica
McManus (Sarah Gopnik), David Kang (Clive Park) and Fyvush Finkel
(Dybbuk?).
A Serious Man NYT Critics Pick

Directors Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

4 of 5

1/9/17, 4:52 PM

From Coen Brothers, Calls to God and Always a Busy Signal - The...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/movies/02serious.html

Writers Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

Stars Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Sari Lennick
Rating R
Running Time 1h 46m
Genres Comedy, Drama

Movie data powered by IMDb.com

Last updated: Mar 30, 2016
A version of this review appears in print on October 2, 2009, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the
headline: Repeated Calls to God, And Always a Busy Signal.

2017 The New York Times Company

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1/9/17, 4:52 PM