[A previous blog entry of mine from last year has
material on this film. Edits 3/17/16.]
This is a film that allows me to say with respect to Jewish
themes (while I am a goy), “Who cares
about the notion that X work of art is only for a limited audience.” This “limited audience” stuff is the sort of
objection I’ve gotten to some of my book-length works over the years (which,
incidentally, had little or nothing to do with Jewish identity). If you’re
serious about your work, you can indicate a universal relevance in any work of
art, even if the subject seems, on the surface, arcane, parochial, too
“subgroup-oriented,” or whatever.
Ask if the work is made with
heart, and if there are more universal themes mixed in with the more
parochial values (say, if a work is on a type of illness, then the issues of
solitude, pain, and finding meaning in life can still appeal to a wide range of
people). If it is (and there are), then who cares if (as in A Serious Man) there are a lot of
Yiddish or Hebrew terms used by the characters, and yarmulkes worn, and “ironic about goys” talk, and a big cast in the credits that you know isn’t
representative of the King Family. I mean, my experience with Jewish
people has run through five decades (since the 1960s), and it has included all
values of interactions (good, bad, intricate, shallow, etc.), and after all
these years, I can sit down and love watching this film. I like it both for its
parochial touches and for its universal themes, as well as its technical
adeptness.
But beware: it isn’t a consistent fun-fest. It deals with
despair as induced by life circumstances, not by illness (mental or physical).
It also treads a line between serious handling of a striving man’s suffering
and a comic look at some of the (semi-)absurdity that can fictionally happen to
the same man. From another angle, the film has a Saul Bellow–ish quality: it
mixes a sort of earthy, street-smart humor with a treatment at high-culture
themes, such as meaning in life and of suffering. In this way, it reminds me of
one of the few Bellow works I’ve read (and enjoyed and valued), his early short
story/novella “Seize the Day.” (His novel Humboldt’s
Gift I also recommend.)
By the way, this film (according to its Wikipedia article) did make more than four times its cost, but both its cost and its
worldwide earnings were pretty small—by no means of Transformers scale.
The plot comes with a
tangle of absurdities
The main character of A
Serious Man, Larry Gopnik, played by Michael Stuhlbarg, is a physics
professor at a Midwestern university, and—along with dealing with a student who
failed the midterm and now is trying to bribe him into giving him a better
grade—his wife (somewhat shrewishly played by Sari Lennick) wants a
divorce, after finding a satisfying partner in an older and familiar person, Sy
Ableman. As the film spells out rather schematically (both in its unfolding
drama and in making-of-doc comments), Sy is a “bigger deal” than Larry because
he manages to be more of a “serious man,” or a macher (a Yiddish word) as Fred Melamed, who plays Sy,
comments.
I’ve never been entirely clear if the Coens wanted, by
posing the “serious man” concept, to really mean “a good Jew” (when the film
was released in Israel
in a Hebrew-language version, I understand it had the title A Good Jew), but knew this wouldn’t
entirely fly in an American market. Another way to explain the title is that
they were being a little more abstract than indirect/coy, as their concepts and
stylizations through their work in general can be a bit arch, and in line with
this, they wanted to focus on the more universal topic of “being the best you
can be in your role.” In other words, a “serious man” was one with a little
more authenticity, as the existentialists used to say, though I find Larry
Gopnik’s working hard to be a breadwinning dad as a professor to be authentic
enough (while Sy, shallowly enough, plays golf and drives a big Caddy).
It seems to me the character of Larry is more one of a
sincere man who crumbles into emotional crisis because of a train of objective
misfortunes, and maybe the film is trying to say he could be more of a “serious
man” if he didn’t let his troubles get him down so much. However, if Sy Ableman
is an example of a “serious man,” he seems like a rather compromised version of
this: he’s a successful enough, average American of some kind, who presents an
unctuous manner when trying to smooth over relations—with a neighborliness that
seems wildly at odds with his moral position—with Larry in the midst of taking
Larry’s wife away from him.
Other aspects of Larry’s complicated life include his being
up for tenure (and a colleague advises him, unofficially, how the deliberations
are going, and it turns out someone has anonymously been writing negative
letters to the committee about Larry; we wonder after a while if that is Sy).
Meanwhile, his son, who is studying for his bar mitzvah and fights with his
sister with colorful curses, is getting into marijuana and has enrolled in a
record-album club with a subscription he has put in his father’s name. And his
brother Arthur (played by Richard Kind, who appears in a couple of Tom
McCarthy’s films) seems like an autistic savant, or something else not quite
normal, who writes and draws (seemingly doing manic doodling) in a school-notebook-type
journal he calls the “mentaculus.” Arthur also has a “sebaceous cyst” on the
back of his neck that he uses a mechanical device to evacuate accumulating goo
from. So this movie is packed with people and their personal problems, and
curve balls of fate.
The twists of fate even include the fact that Larry ends up
being the one obliged (however this happened) to pay for the funeral of newly
deceased Sy, the man who’d become his wife’s new lover (or soul mate, with
partnership not yet consummated).
The “short” at the
beginning of the film
The five-or-so-minute mini-drama at the start of the
film—characterized by the Coens in the making-of doc as like the cartoon that
used to run before feature films in theaters years ago, and not really meant to
relate to the film proper—is interesting (it grows on you, I think, if you
watch it more than once). Spoken entirely in Yiddish (with English subtitles),
it recounts a couple’s conversation about the man’s having seen an old friend
(and/or community pillar, maybe a rabbi), Traitle Groshkover, from whom he’d
just gotten help on the road in tending to his business. The wife says the man
he’d encountered was dead—he had died three years ago.
Then, portentously, Groshkover shows up at the door—a
long-bearded sort played by Fyvush Finkel. The wife, certain that this
friendly, small-talking entity is a dybbuk, a dead body inhabited by a random
spirit, eventually thrusts a knife or other sharp tool into his chest to prove
it. At first the suspected dybbuk, astonished, doesn’t bleed, then he does. He
leaves, with a tone of disappointment at how he’s been treated. The whole
episode may seem puzzling—it is a made-up folk tale, according to Ethan
Coen—but overall it may serve as a reminder, perhaps, of how many U.S. Jews
have descended from the tradition-schooled shtetl residents (as romanticized in
Fiddler on the Roof) who flourished
in Eastern Europe many years ago.
When the film moves to its title sequence, and we see all
the Jewish names, we wonder next, What kind of story is this?, while the rock
group Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love” pulses on the soundtrack. Then we
are delivered to a modern-day (well, 1967) scene, with people looking
recognizably modern (OK, 1967-ish) and American (even if a high school–age
class has a Hebrew lesson). Now the “old times” we are dealing with are about
45 years ago, with people who seem to blend (1) modern American ways of
embracing values and comporting self, with (2) a more “Old
World” parochial set of values and standards.
The tradition-bound Jews here are merging with what could be
called the beginning of modern-style America (which some not so sympathetic to
it would call the “Me Decade” way of living—and take your pick as to which
decade since the 1960s has been called the “Me Decade”). Cultural shocks to
this Midwestern community of Jews include divorce, sneaking commercialism, and
recreational drug use. This picture I give—“Jews x ‘Me
Decade’ values”—is one interpretation of the cultural intermixing the film
depicts—though I don’t know if it’s necessarily the Coens’.
Tchotchkes of details
in this film
One thing I’ve heard critically said about this film is that
it heavily focuses on details. I think this makes for part of its charm. Along with
the clinically clear-eyed cinematography of Roger Deakins, what makes
this film both an engrossing study and a colorful environment in which to see
its emotional drama play out are the details that bring home both the
drolly-embraced look at late-Sixties culture and the Jewish usages of a wide
range of kinds.
* Notice that Larry Gopnik’s pants are so short, they ride
up his legs as, early on, he writes on the blackboard. We kids in grade school
used to call such pants “flood pants” or “floods”—as if the legs were so short,
they wouldn’t get wet in floods.
* Among ritual Jewish usages, notice the mezuzahs on the
frames of doorways. Even Mrs. Samsky, who seems in her life to take a walk on
the wild side (to Larry: “Do you take advantage of the new freedoms?”), has one
at her door.
* When Arthur has a minor breakdown when he and Larry are
living at a motor lodge, he is in a fit of despair and self-pity, and says
“Hashem [phonetic spelling] hasn’t given me shit! … He hasn’t given me bupkis!”
Bupkis, as I understand, is a Yiddish
word that means, roughly, “shit”; I think it literally means “goat piss.” It
was used in a recent Capital One ad campaign featuring comedian Jerry Stiller
(who must be pushing 90 by now).
* By the way, Hashem
is, from what I gather, an informal reference to God, for those Jews who, I
presume, shy from using the Tetragrammaton or other more formal reference to
God. (Adonai is another less-formal
reference to God, which in this film I think is heard during the bar mitzvah
ceremony.) It is interesting to consider this relatively modest Midwestern
Jewish community being apt to “soft pedal” reference to God, as a sign of
respect; meanwhile, in the Coens’ previous film Burn After Reading (2008; see my review of December 4), the
constellation of people there, who seem almost exclusively Gentiles, use rather
nasty curses, as if signifying how far they’ve fallen from traditional cultural
standards, or such.
* The Coens get in a few looks at “humanity at its less
flattering,” such as a waddling old female office worker in a print dress,
clearing her throat grotesquely after she delivers a rabbi his tea. In a late
scene, when Danny, Larry’s son, finally meets up with Rabbi Marshak (whom Larry
has been trying to consult with, and been perpetually unable to), the man seems
apt to give out—before finally uttering some modest words of wisdom—old-fart-style
idle vocalizations and groans.
* I was trying to find out who sang the Yiddish pop/folk-type
music that Larry “rocks out”—I mean, relaxes—to
once or a few times in the film; it seems to be a Sidor Belafsky [sp?]; others
would know better than I.
The marijuana theme
The movie’s use of marijuana as a plot element raises a few
questions: (1) As an example of the “porn thread” in movies, a sort of sop to
the Joe Averages with ticket money to spend, is it acceptable enough for this
film? (2) Does it undercut the film’s more seriously handled themes? (3) How
does it resonate with the consciousness of marijuana in the U.S. today
(2013)?
Of course, how it appears in the film is (1) when Larry
visits his sexy next-door neighbor Mrs. Samsky, on the assumption he should
help others (following a rabbi’s advice—“Help others?—couldn’t hurt”), she leads
him to smoke a joint with her (and therewith he appreciates—or thinks he
does—another rabbi’s advice to seek a better perspective); and (2) in the
climactic scene of the film, Larry’s son, who has been studying Torah for his
bar mitzvah, goes through the ceremony stoned, with apparently no one but his
fellow smoker friend (and maybe Mrs. Samsky, seated in the congregation) wiser
about his condition.
I have spoken on my views on recreational use of marijuana
before, in my review last August 9 of Easy
Rider. Marijuana is increasingly in the news and in other segments of media
culture. A Star-Ledger (the New
Jersey newspaper) editorial from this January 23, 2013, pointed out the
inconsistency of federal restrictions and legal stigmatization of marijuana—its
federal classification makes even its academic study impossible or hard—even
while medical marijuana, recently approved in New Jersey (and its
implementation slow and cumbersome in getting started), is used in a somewhat
tepid fashion, and the federally approved Marisol, a synthetic concentration of
THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, turns out to be bluntly
unsatisfactory.
I am in favor of use of medical marijuana for a fairly
simple reason: If it helps patients deal with such things as nausea (brought
about by a longstanding, profound medical condition, either as a side effect or
otherwise) or one of the debilitating effects of the likes of multiple
sclerosis, and it helps like nothing else, why not use it? For me, some
medications—not least, various psychiatric treatments produced by Big
Pharma—have side effects that are not far from being stoned (e.g., sleepiness,
stimulated hunger, a sort of increased estheticism). And these side effects are
from synthetic chemicals. Marijuana is a naturally occurring substance
(granted, not everything natural is good for you) that may have therapeutic
effects for some patients, while no one has a problem with approving of
synthetic chemicals such as some psychiatric medications, which, in addition to
producing side effects like being stoned, can cause long-term problems like
diabetes and tardive dyskinesia (as the antipsychotics can do; see “product
information” profiles on such medications in the PDR). The logic here of considering marijuana no more or less bad seems
fairly clear.
I think what causes hesitation in some to use medical
marijuana is the long-term phenomenon of recreational use of pot in this
country (and elsewhere). I must point out that I have, for well over 30 years,
been disapproving of recreational use of pot (though I tried it a very few
times in the late 1970s—and it would amuse you in what context this was). To
me, it was—in the 1970s—a paining correlate of heartbreaking ravages of substance
abuse to which I was a close witness in those humid, economically challenged
years. As I get older, I get more understanding, and as I’ve said elsewhere,
for some reason a lot of pot humor (in verbal art) strikes me as funny. (By the
way—a discussion for another time—it could
be pointed out that the Coens’ genre of storytelling—especially in some of its
details—is “stoner humor,” especially with their older movies—1987-94. I think
their work need not be studied this way, and certainly their later
movies—especially from the past decade—generally tend to get away from that,
and take a more embracing, if satirizing, look at America.)
In the few years since A
Serious Man was released, marijuana seems to have come under increasing
acceptance in various discussion of it in the media. It pops up as a regular
joke element, such as in comedian Jon Stewart’s monologue during the 12-12-12
concert about the Pink Floyd music reminding you of the days when you hid your
pot; or in the very mixed-bag CBS sitcom, with its occasional good laughs, 2 Broke Girls. As I’ve noted, newspapers
hash out (no pun intended) discussion of the inconsistency of the federal
government’s hard stance on pot being a dangerous drug, even while states take
progressive steps to allowing medical marijuana.
How serious?
The most important question with A Serious Man is, What is meant by Larry’s son Danny getting
through his bar mitzvah stoned? Is the film saying that if you can’t deal with
the heavy trials of life with consultation with a spiritual leader of your
choice, or with some other “non-medical” means, you can turn to pot? I frankly
am not sure, but I think as a sort of larky element to the film’s story, this
stoned sequence can be accepted (or forgiven) well enough.
And there’s enough traditional Jewish ritual woven in
through the marijuana blur that the film delivers its more sober horsepill
along with its more whimsical “candy” of Danny half-stumbling through his rite
of passage and almost forgetting the song bit he’d learned as a pedagogical correlate
for learning part of the Torah.
And is this so much more brow-raising than the really
Coens-style sequence in the middle of the film, depicting a sort of parable
told by one rabbi (played by a poised George Wyner), about “the goy’s
teeth”? Here, a Jewish dentist finds Hebrew lettering seemingly drilled into a
goy’s (Gentile’s) front lower teeth, which seems to give the dentist some
occult advice. Much of the sequence is scored to Jimi Hendrix’s “Machine Gun.”
Take a look and then you’ll really wonder how serious the Coens were with A Serious Man.
