Ever since Joel and Ethan Coen began making movies critics have castigated them for looking down on their own characters.
Nonsense. Who didn’t love Ed, the police officer turned baby thief in “Raising Arizona,” or so many of their other quirky players?
Halfway through the Coens’ latest film, “A Serious Man,” all those criticisms come storming back to mind.
The film is smart, droll and rigorously thought provoking. But it’s clear the Coens have disdain for their new characters – with a little left over for their audience.
“A Serious Man” discards the usual Coen actors, opting for relative unknown Michael Stuhlbarg to play Larry Gopnik, a professor going through a pretty rough patch.
Larry’s wife is leaving him for another man, his chances for tenure appear to be fading and a student’s father threatens to sue him for failing his son.
And the Coens take great delight in all of the above.
What’s a serious man to do, especially one who has invested so very much in being as decent as his rabbis implore him to be?
“A Serious Man” is the talented duo’s most personal, and spiritual, production. Yet their distinct approach – never yell “action” until everyone in the cast is ready to deliver their lines with their veins popping out or as if they’re about to drift off to sleep – doesn’t resonate this time around.
Instead, it’s suffocating.
And while the Jewish themes powering the story, some hilarious, some more intimate than we’ve seen from the Oscar-winning brothers, are met head on by a wave of ugliness. Cameo roles are played by unattractive souls who shuffle in and out of the screen as if taking their last steps.
Larry’s troubled brother (Richard Kind) lives an ugly life of his own, desperate and alone despite living in Larry’s house.
Even Larry’s wife slurps down her soup in an exaggerated fashion.
None of this would matter had “A Serious Man” held together as tightly as most of their previous films. But the story never coalesces into something of substance. It feels too much like a workshop for the Coens to exercise their personal demons, dragging us along in the process.
Some starkly wry moments do ring out, like every time Sy (Fred Melamed), the man Larry’s wife is smitten with, enters the frame.
The Coens have picked up a tic in recent years, ending their films with a jolt. It worked beautifully with “No Country for Old Men,” and less so with “Burn After Reading.”
“A Serious Man” skids to a halt, the final evidence the Coens are telling an inside joke they’re not interested in sharing with their audience.
(Photo: Michael Stuhlberg (foreground) and Adam Arkin star in “A Serious Man,” the latest film from Joel and Ethan Coen. Photo courtesy of Focus Features)
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I completely disagree. Admittedly, I am a huge Coen fan, but I really do think that this film is brilliant. I don’t think that the brothers look down on Professor Gopnik, who is the film’s Job. The plot and characters are all in the Jewish literary traditions of dark humor and of deeply philosophical questioning (and, to some degree a very American literary tradition of Jewish self-loathing). They (and we, the audience) identify with Larry who think that the world and “Hashem” has turned against him but does not see the wonderful things both have provided in his life. And, when we see his brother complain the same refrain and wonder why his brother has so much that we realize that everyone plays both roles at some point in our lives, sometimes simultaneously.
I am interested in seeing this, although I have a feeling our impressions will be similar based on other things I’ve read.
From one Coen Bros fan to another I have to ask you this Christian:
When looking at the entirety of their work, where do you rank Fargo? I put it right in the middle. I seem to be one of the only Coen Bros fans who wasn’t blown away by it. I think its good, probably great, but I saw Barton Fink and Miller’s Crossing before Fargo so I already knew the Coens were geniuses. I think Raising Arizona and No Country for Old Men are both superior to Fargo. And Miller’s Crossing, in my opinion, is their best film and probably the best film of the 90’s.
Anyway, just interested in your thoughts.
I love the Coens’ films. Their hits outweigh the misses, and the former represents some of the best films made over the last 20 years.
But yeah, “Fargo” is overrated. The film, to me, seemed like the moment when people “got” them for the first time so the critical love began pouring out to them for the first time en masse. Much of the praise it received should have gone to Miller’s Crossing, a stunning piece of work.
Thanks Christian, my thoughts exactly. No matter how many times I watch Miller’s Crossing it always has the same impact.