Danny is A SERIOUS MAN. The Latest from Joel and Ethan Coen - Reviewed!

A SERIOUS MAN Review:

- "Man, those Coen Bros. are *good*." I kept thinking a variation on that sentiment over and over again while watching the Coens' latest, A Serious Man. While watching this hilarious, thought-provoking, and brilliantly-shot and acted film, I had that same feeling I've had while watching other Coen Bros. productions, that same feeling I got recently while watching movies like Inglorious Basterds. The feeling that the director has you in the palm of their hand. The feeling that you're watching a master manipulator - of images, of words, of storytelling - at work. It's amazing to simply watch A Serious Man and marvel at each delicately chosen turn-of-phrase, at each carefully crafted character, at each visually-rich shot and each precisely effective camera angle. This is another superlative movie from perhaps the best writers-directors working today.

A Serious Man is set in that strange Coen Bros. universe that has one foot firmly planted in reality, with a keen eye towards observational humor, and the other foot threatening to veer off into the surreal and strange. That said, many have commented that this is the duo's most autobiographical work to date - based, to some extent, on their Jewish upbringings in 1960's midwestern suburbia. And there is a detail and authenticity to some of the characters and events here that could only have come from personal experience. I think that those who had a semi-traditional Jewish upbringing will smile in recognition at many of the scenes here. The odd mix of American suburbia and half-assimilated Jewish life (that still exists today) is perfectly captured, in scenes of Hebrew school drudgery, of awkward talks with not-as-smart-as-you-hoped-they'd-be rabbis, and in a masterful sequence covering the tense, climactic moments of a bar-mitzvah service. But even if you're not Jewish or not familiar with Jewish customs, I think you'll nonetheless get caught up in this world that the Coens create. The attention to detail draws you in, and the humor, the characters, and the dialogue keeps you glued to the screen.

This being the Coens though, A Serious Man is not simply a slice-of-life sort of movie. As always, they take small people and look at them from a cosmic viewpoint. Like Burn After Reading, A Serious Man has the feeling of watching these characters as they blindly stumble their way towards the cruel punchline of a grand cosmic joke. This is a movie about an ordinary man whose carefully-composed life is unravelling at the seams. His wife has suddenly taken up with another man, his son spends all his time watching F-Troop and listening to his transistor radio rather than studying his bar-mitzvah torah portion. At his job as a college physics professor, an angry student is trying to bribe him to upgrade his F to a passing grade. He's theoretically up for tenure but can never elicit a straight answer from his bosses about his prospects. His sadsack of a brother is staying at his house, perpetually occupying the bathroom. His daughter nags him, his neighbor scares him, and his lawyer is overpriced. All of these problems, major and minor, keep escalating until this ordinarily unassuming man is on the verge of breaking down. And that leads to the central qustion at the heart of the movie: is there some deeper meaning to all of life's struggles? Are they God's way of telling us something? Is there method to the madness, or do we simply lead lives devoid of any real meaning or purpose? The recurring theme of the movie is seemingly profound stories that are rendered meaningless because they don't have any sort of real ending, they don't contain any real answers to the very questions that they pose. The movie itself is one of those stories. It makes us think about the nature of true wisdom and knowledge. Is there any great truth to be found in the bible, in the old stories, in ancient tradition, that is really any deeper or more reassuring than the lyrics of a Jefferson Airplane song? Is a passage of Leviticus any more meaningfull than: "When the truth is found to be lies - and all the joy within you dies - don't you want somebody to love?" A man steeped in culture and religion would argue that, surely, the wisdom of a learned rabbi trumps that of a rock n' roll song. But this movie posits that maybe it's all just noise. Whatever works for you. If it really is all meaningless, then who is anyone to pass judgement on anyone else?

These are the kind of themes that I love, and these are the kinds of discussions that almost always arise after a Coen Bros. movie. Their stories are sometimes small in scale, but always enormous in terms of thematic scope.

It goes without saying that A Serious Man contains the same sort of brilliant, rythmic dialogue that we've seen in movies like Fargo and No Country For Old Men. It goes without saying that it has the same kind of hilarious back-and-forth exchanges that made movies like The Big Lebowski into cult classics. And it goes without saying that it has the same kind of sweeping, iconic cinematography that characterizes those same movies. A Serious Man even features a stirring score from frequent Coen collaborator Carter Burwell. But here's something that I haven't heard a lot of people talk about - the casting. The Coens have a knack for finding just the right talent to bring their distinct characters to life. A Serious Man lacks almost any name actors. It features a lead known mostly for theater work in Michael Stuhlbarg. But man, this is a defining performance for the actor, playing the put-upon Larry Gopnick. He's absolutely great here, a wound-tight, neurotic physics professor who can rarely quite emote exactly what's on his mind. Exactly the kind of everyman primed and ready for a meltdown should his small universe begin to fall apart. Stuhlbarg is surrounded by an amazing cast of character actors. There's Richard Kind from Curb Your Enthusiasm as the down-on-his-luck uncle. There's a scene-stealing Fred Melamed as the dorky Sy Ableman - the slow-talking Jew who, much to everyone's surprise, somehow wins the affections of Gropnick's wife, and then proceeds to cordially work out the details of a ritual divorce with Larry. George Wyner is absolutely hilarious in several scenes as Gropnick's useless rabbi. And Aaron Wolff is really good and very funny as Gropnick's teenaged son, who preps for his bar-mitzvah torah reading by smoking a joint in the bathroom just prior to the service. Again, these aren't big-name talents, but man, they do great work in A Serious Man.

I could go on and on about this one, but I'll simply say that this, to me, is in the upper tier of the Coen Bros. catalogue. Whenever the brothers release a new movie, there are always the naysayers who claim that their latest doesn't measure up to their best works. And there are always those who think that just because a movie is a comedy, that it couldn't possibly measure up to a strictly serious work. But A Serious Man is a serious movie. Sure, it's funny as hell, but in many ways it's just as dark, if not darker, then No Country For Old Men. At least in that movie, evil is personified in Anton Chigurgh - he's a tangible embodiment of our fears and worst instincts. Here, the eternal question of why bad things happen to good people has no answer, has no rhyme or reason. A Serious Man is both a look at the lives of American Jews in the 1960's and also a deeper examination of the questions and neuroses that have plagued the Jewish people from ancient times until now. It reminded me of something that teachers and rabbis used to tell us in Hebrew School - that if you start studying the kaballah before you are ready, the questions that will be posed and the truths that will be revealed could be so overwhelming as to drive you insane. So tread carefully when looking for hidden meaning. A Serious Man confronts this path for answers and shows us the potential to come up empty. It's a movie I'll be talking and thinking about for a long time to come.

But the bottom line is this: this one is yet another must-see from Joel and Ethan Coen.

My Grade: A