A Serious Man is a black comedy set in, well lets just say late 60’s as there are some iffy details. Larry Gopnik is possibly up for tenure, his wife is leaving him, his son keeps complaining about the TV signal, he has a minor boundary dispute with his neighbours and his brother Arthur is sleeping on his couch. Basically bad shit keeps happening to Larry.
And to round it out there’s a side plot with his son smoking a fair bit of weed while preparing for his Bar Mitzvah and trying to get a radio back so he can give the big guy he bought the weed from the $20 he owes him that’s stuck in the back.
It’s nice watching a movie without any preconceptions. I didn’t realise until the end that I had read about this a little, I forgot that this was the Coen’s latest. In fact I got the title twisted up with A Single Man and was expecting to see Colin Firth being a gay. This made the pre-credit opening, about a family dealing with a…vampire or demon? A Rabbi who is supposedly dead. Anyway, I wondered what the hell that was doing before A Single Man.
And of course it wasn’t because I’m an idiot. While its still strange to have a scene seemingly, though not entirely, unrelated to the rest of the movie set 100 years before in a Polish village its far from the only strange element in A Serious Man. Hell, most of it is strange. You’ve got a junior Rabbi imploring Larry to look at the car park, a South Korean student who can’t do the physics math and insists he didn’t try and bribe Larry while admitting it and the cuckold of the story, Sy Ableman, being very friendly while trying to get Larry to have a Get (a ritual Jewish divorce, running gag of people not knowing what it is), and in the later half Larry has some vivid and bizarre dreams.
Sy is A Serious Man, and Larry tries to be a serious man. For a film with so many people trying to be serious its damned funny. And very Jewish.
Everyone is good in this, though nothing mind blowing really. Larry is very well played by Michael Stuhlbarg. The performance and character actually reminded me a fair bit of the lead character in Eraserhead. While this is a bit weird it’s obviously not on that level of fucked uppery, but the lead goes through with a puzzled expression. Larry’s a lot like that. Bad stuff keeps happening to him and he has no idea what the hell is going on most of the time, looking like a lost puppy and trying to do good for everyone.
And the experience is much the same for the viewer. Don’t expect a lot of explanations, though its not a hard film to follow. Not everything gets neatly tied up, the film doesn’t conclude with a nice little bow. There’s a lot of religious allusions here, stuff I didn’t really notice as I’m not religious and have never been Jewish (its old testament mainly though) but for those in the know Larry is basically Job.
Character pieces like this live and die on two things. Did you like, or at least find believable, the characters and is the writing any good. A Serious Man ticks both of those boxes. And it kinda reminded me of the Wonder Years in its look which isn’t a bad thing.
Next up: In The Loop
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment