(Warning: Readers may want to read this review after rather than before seeing the film because elements of the plot, including the last scenes, are discussed in the review.)
In their new movie A Serious Man, Joel and Ethan Coen have added one more stone to the immense structure of their oeuvre that might be titled "America: The End is Nigh." A Serious Mantakes the form of a seriously dark comedy; like many if not all of the Coen brothers’ films, it is fascinating, visually compelling, laugh-out-loud funny –and very, very frightening.
A Serious Man is, on the surface, a story about the trials and tribulations of a nerdy Jewish college professor in Minnesota in the 1960s. Larry Gopnik lives in a bleak, Levittown-like suburbia that is filmed by the Coens in a way that underlines the starkness of the setting. The neighborhood is brutally flat and colorless (there are almost no trees or even bushes); each split-level ranch house is an Isolate surrounded by an immense "lawn" that is not an "escape from the oppressions of the city" –that cherished component of the American Dream -- but rather a yellowish, anemic tract that adds to, rather than soothes, Gopnik’s miseries. The lawn produces an argument with his "goy" neighbor about who-mows-what and a boundary dispute that reveals the neighbor as a snarling, aggressive anti-Semite and Gopnik as a pathetic wimp.
The interiors of Gopnik’s house and the houses of his neighbors reflect the bleakness of the neighborhood. Much in the manner of the brilliant New Yorker cartoons of George Price, every object in these houses is hideous (Look at those lamps! Check out the ghastly pictures!); in addition, the colors are shrill and vulgar; the spaces are cramped, awkward and ugly and the "drapes" that cover the "picture windows" are always drawn. Sunlight never enters the dark and forbidding spaces of the Coens’ suburbia.
None of this soulessness is ever commented on by the Coens. It is simply present: Here it is, they say. This was suburban America in the 1960s. Evaluate it as you wish.
The Coen’s own evaluation of this little corner of the American Dream is unstated but unequivocal. They film suburbia the way a prisoner might film his prison: both inside and out, Gopnik’s neighborhood is barren, ugly and dehumanizing. (And, it should be added, they also turn an intellectual blowtorch on the neighborhood’s Jewish culture, whose lawyers, dentists, and particularly rabbinical avatars (see below) they "off" with icy contempt.)
Not surprisingly, the characters who inhabit these soul-destroying spaces are desperate or incapacitated.—or in the case of the "goy" neighbor (a hunter who keeps his kid out of school to go on a hunting trip and returns with a huge, bloody, dead stag) , angry and truculent.
Gopnik’s wife Judith is a humorless, thick-waisted bitch who has taken a fat, pompous blowhard as a (non-sexual) lover; the lover himself is killed in an automobile accident late in the movie -- and Gopnik the schlemiel meekly attends the funeral service as a mourner, and indeed allows his own home to be used for the mourning service.
The Gopniks’ teenage daughter is a homely, shrill brat whose life is focused on stealing enough money from her father to get a nose job, on getting more time in the bathroom to do her hair, and on quarrelling with her younger brother. The brother is a hapless kid whose principal interests seem to be smoking pot (he arrives stoned for his own bar mitzvah); talking (quite ugly) trash with his 12 year old buddies and endlessly whining to his father about the various dysfunctions of the suburban dream house (the TV doesn’t work, the aerial is broken, etc.).
To round out this Charles Adams-sky family, we have Uncle Arthur, a Major League Loser who sleeps on the living room couch and suffers from some mysterious and disgusting ailment that requires him to be attached for long periods of time to some kind of drain. Uncle Arthur is broke and unemployed; and he is arrested mid-film for soliciting a cop in a public restroom.
The movie’s central character is Larry Gopnik, a man who, as many critics have commented, is a kind of modern-day Job. But the Coens’ Job inhabits a universe in which his troubles are caused, dear Brutus, not by his stars but by his own passivity and inertia.
Thus when Judith tells him she wants a divorce, he agrees -- passively, without argument -- to move out of the family "home." And when Judith’s loathsome "boyfriend" – the unctuous Sy Adelman-- proposes to meet with him to arrange a "friendly" divorce, he does not punch the wife-stealing Adelman in the nose or tell his cheating wife to move her fat ass out of the house: he wearily agrees to meet with Adelman in a dreary kind of senior-citizen lunchroom called "The Embers" (presumably dying), and even to be smothered in Adelman’s smarmy, pot-bellied embrace. (We learn later that Adelman, --who, like almost everyone else in the film, is broke-- is apparently the author of the anonymous hate mail that threatens to de-rail Gopnik’s pending tenure application.)
Who, in fact, is this Gopnik? The critics have focused on the Jewishness of the film’s setting and on the Job-like elements of Gopnik’s circumstances.
The framework of this film is certainly Jewish suburban life in the 1960s, and Gopnik does suffer a series of Job-like plagues. But just as Moby Dick is more than a story about a whale, so A Serious Man is more than a story about suburban Jewish life in Minnesota in the 1960s.
As presented by the Coens, Gopnik is the American Everyman, and the Coens use the setting of the Midwestern Jewish suburb as a metaphor to tell a story about America today.
Thus Gopnik/America is challenged by a Korean student (not an "asiatic" student, as several critics have said: a specifically Korean student; i.e., a student from one of those aggressively successful Pacific-rim countries that are eating America’s lunch in the international economic arena) to upgrade his grade from failing to passing. The student makes his demand coldly, indeed arrogantly; after he leaves Gopnik’s office, Gopnik is shocked – shocked! – to find among his papers an envelope stuffed with cash. When Gopnik threatens to expose the student to some vague "authority" for this attempted bribery, the student drops his veil of politesse and sends his businessman father to see Gopnik. The father delivers an explicit, mafia-like threat: pass the kid –or else. And Gopnik (a/k/a America), passive and cowardly to the end-- and now in increasingly desperate financial hot water- capitulates to the Korean demand and replaces the student’s F with a Gentleman’s "C."
It would be difficult to imagine a more specific reference to America’s contemporary relationship with the Asia’s Economic Tigers than Gopnik and the Koreans. Intimidated by the virulent energy of these Asians, America seems, at least to the Coens, to be Larry Gopnik writ large: uncertain, passive and powerless. We are a country, they argue, that is able to deliver moral lectures, as Gopnik did to the Korean student and as both Secretary Clinton and President Obama have not hesitated to do to the Chinese and our other "allies" in the East; but when it comes to insisting –on minimal human rights in China, for example, or on effective action against global warming – America, like Gopnik, caves. And Asia, like Gopnik’s student, contemptuously gives America the cash – and the finger.
As Gopnik/America’s universe swirls ever more radically out of his control, Our Hero turns to Authority/Religion for help. He seeks the aid of three different rabbis.
The first and youngest rabbi condescendingly offers him nonsensical, Lewis-Carroll-like gibberish.
The second, a middle-aged sage, offers him a pompous, lengthy and incomprehensible parable.
The third, The Great Wise Man, is too busy "thinking’ to spare him any time.
In The Coens America, Religion provides no solace and Authority provides no answers. (And the specifically "Jewish" spokesmen of this culture are mindless, self-important blowhards.)
Nor does the Coens’ America offer the solace of beauty --although the filming of the Coens’ suburbia is brilliant and beautiful. (Think Picasso’s depiction of the horrors of war in Guernica, think Goya’s etchings.)
In the Coen’s America, the flat, featureless landscapes (all beautifully filmed) are bleak and forbidding; the suburban architecture is banal and depressing; the people are grotesque. With the sole exception of the beautiful, sexy neighbor who unsuccessfully attempts to seduce the apparently impotent Gopnik, every single person in the movie is either ordinary looking (Gopnik himself) or aggressively ugly (the secretaries of the various rabbis). And in a striking comment on our national image, almost everyone in the movie is fat.
Not Pleasantly Plump.
Grossly, egregiously, lumberingly, fat.
At the end of the movie, having been failed by his family, by Authority/Religion, by sex (his wife makes several pointed allusions to their non-sex life) Gopnik is alone, faced with a terrifying, incomprehensible world. Sitting at his desk at the University, he receives a telephone call from his doctor.
"I’ve just had a look at your X-rays," the doctor tells him. "I think you’d better come into the office. It would be better to talk about this in person, not over the phone."
From this brief exchange, the audience understands that the doctor is delivering to Goknick/America some version of a death sentence. And with the irony that is their trademark, the Coens’ doctor issues this death sentence on the basis of an examination of his Gopnik/America’s x-rays; i.e., of a view of the patient’s insides, the part that is hidden and invisible to the public.
In the subsequent and final scene of the film, young Gopnik – the bar mitzvah boy, the hope of the future – is shown in the schoolyard under a brightly flapping American flag. Danny and his Jewish/American schoolmates –this is a religious, not a secular public school -- have gone outside after the announcement of a threatened tornado.
But the youngsters do not head down into the cellar, where they might be safe from danger: instead, true Americans, they simply stand, passive, inert and immobilized, as a violent, swirling, dark gray storm bears down relentlessly on them and their school.
And then .........
Bang.
End of film.
The vision of America presented by the Coens in this film is bleak and deeply pessimistic. The landscape is desolate, the people are fat, broke, joyless, perverted, sick, unemployed, impotent, pretentious and empty-headed; they are not consoled by religion or authority or beauty or hope or even sex. Ahead lies a death sentence for some and humiliation at the hands of the Asian Tigers for everyone else. The storm is about to hit; and then the film ends.
A Serious Man is funny and quirky; it is visually superb.
But make no mistake about it: beneath the ha-ha surface of the movie is a dark, dark portrait of America. Perhaps the Coen’s America is not quite as desolate as the America shown in Colmac McCarthy’s The Road. But in a sense, A Serious Man is The Road just before the apocalypse.
This is a scary movie, and in its brutal, unforgiving critique of American life, it is a profoundly subversive movie.
Go see it. You may hate it; you may disagree with it: but it is a masterpiece.