A Serious Man

I recently went to go see the Coen Brothers' new film, A Serious Man. I didn't know much about the film before I went, but my brother saw it previously and was dying to see it again. First off, I must say, I can't imagine the film is as funny if you're not Jewish. My mom, brother and I were the only ones laughing at parts because the Coen Brothers hit it right on the button. The Coen Brothers grew up in a Jewish home in Minnesota and use their personal experience to create the setting for the film.

A Serious Man opens with a dimly lit folktale prologue about a dybbuk — the dislocated soul of a dead person who curses a home into which he’s been invited — and a thrust dagger that might permanently seal the fate of the Gopnik clan.

From this, the Coens cosmically deliver us into the 1967 world of Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg, sweaty and strangely resembling Joaquin Phoenix).

Larry is is a brilliant but tormented physics university professor up for tenure, who suffers through a number of endurance tests. His life is suddenly coming apart in all directions and he can't understand it since he considers himself a good person.

Larry learns, out of the blue, that his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) wants a divorce with a gett (a Jewish ritual divorce so she can have a rabbi perform the ceremony when she remarries) to marry of all people, the film's ironically called serious person, an overbearing recent widower named Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed).



As Larry's tsuris (woes) intensifies, with even more incidents thrown into the mix like a fender-bender, and having to pay for his wife's new interest's funeral, we catch him consulting with his high-priced divorce attorney (Adam Arkin) and with three learned rabbis to help him understand why things have gone awry.

The young rabbi speaks in metaphorical clichés. An older rabbi offers gnomic stories including a hilariously pointless one told in flashback about a dentist who discovers a message written in Hebrew on the back of a Gentile's teeth. The last rabbi, an ancient figure from the European past, is too deep in thought to give him an audience, though he later turns up in a comic and extremely moving scene with Danny after his bar mitzvah.

Eventually, Larry, who always tried to be a serious person, live up to expectations and be a good person who helps others, finds there are no such things as definite answers to the meaning of life. After all, no one said it would be easy to find out what God wants us to do.

At first, the film is slightly frustrating because it leaves a lot of open-ended questions. However the film makes you think, and stays with you a few days after your first viewing. A Serious Man is definitely not your average blockbuster - but something new and refreshing! Check out the trailer: