A SERIOUS MAN (2009)

How can we understand suffering? Can internal pain be rationalised as a chemical imbalance? Can ill health or the loss of a loved one be overcome by recognising that these tragedies are commonplace and that a cluster of them occurring in your life is little more than bad luck? For the protagonist of A Serious Man, middle-aged professor Larry (Michael Stuhlbarg), it’s as if the world has trampled on his happiness and cast him aside. Every event in his life, whether minor or calamitous, feels to him like a targeted attack to crush his spirit, as he helplessly tries to uncover why he can’t seem to get anything in order.

While there are certainly valuable (and even enviable) aspects of this protagonist’s life, it’s also in a continuous state of turmoil. His wife is leaving him, her lover talks to him as if he’s an adult-sized baby, his children are indifferent to his existence, one of his students has left him a bribe (but denies doing so), he’s being charged for records he never asked for or received, his neighbour looks at him with disgust, and his brother is living with him and making no effort to move out. In short, Larry is going through a lot, but rather than focus on these practical challenges, he instead looks towards life’s biggest questions, despairing in the face of them.

This world is intimate yet grand, perfectly encapsulating how Larry’s existence feels symbolically significant about what it means to be alive, or to suffer, or to question one’s suffering. Beautifully realised through Roger Deakins’ expert cinematography, these slices of Larry’s existence acutely capture the mundane and repetitive aspects of life, with the film’s rich colour palette and gorgeous shots feeling like an ironically bitter comment on this day-to-day drudgery. But it also conveys the importance of such moments, which are essentially all that Larry has to rely on, as well as offering plenty of room for A Serious Man’s wonderful blend of comedy and drama to shine.

The Coen Brothers have found countless ways throughout their varied filmography to meld comedy and drama seamlessly. But it’s never so fitting as it is in this film, which takes on life’s most difficult questions and leaves it completely open to viewers as to whether or not it answers them. The only way to truly sell this idea is to craft each moment to write a great scene and ensure that nothing presented here takes away from the movie’s ambiguity. Michael Stuhlbarg is the perfect actor to serve as a conduit for this experience, wearing Larry’s neuroticism and anxiety plainly, so we can both laugh at and pity this protagonist.

Stuhlbarg is equally hilarious when he’s affecting Larry’s soft speaking voice in everyday conversation (which becomes even softer in moments of hopelessness), or outbursts where he can no longer contain his anger or despair. But for as funny as it is to watch Larry’s helplessness, the actor somehow manages to escape the trap of letting him be seen purely as a joke. For all of the moments where his personality is mined for comedy, Larry’s dilemmas still contain a vein of earnestness, where it’s impossible not to be endeared towards someone trying their hardest to stop being batted down by life itself.

However, it’s not with this protagonist that we begin this tale. Instead, the opening scene of A Serious Man follows a Jewish man in 19th-century Europe as he returns home, where he tells his wife about a pleasant encounter he had with Reb Groshkover. His wife insists that Groshkover died three years ago, claiming that the man he encountered must be a dybbuk (an evil spirit possessing a dead body). When Groshkover arrives at their home, the guest behaves cordially, but his wife plunges an ice pick into him. As he begins to bleed from the wound, Groshkover exits. The husband is devastated, believing that they are ruined, but his wife is firm in her conviction that she just rid their home of an evil spirit.

There might not be obvious parallels between this made-up tale, designed to feel like a biblical story or piece of Yiddish folklore, and the movie’s main drama, but it’s in the ways that this parable is analogous and disanalogous to Larry’s pondering that this movie finds its meaning. As Larry desperately searches for answers to the big questions in life, he calls upon the help of different rabbis for guidance. While none of them recite this exact folk tale, the messages they offer are fundamentally quite similar, and at times are just as indecisive as the non-answer embedded in this film’s opening scene.

The guidance he’s offered in the spiritual realm does nothing to alleviate Larry’s suffering, to the extent that these platitudes and folk tales being dispensed as actionable advice feel like a sad, sick joke. And to some extent, it is, which the Coen Brothers toy with throughout the film. It isn’t the first—or last—time that they’ve been preoccupied with the absurdity of life, digging up plenty of dark comedy from the madness of the everyday.

But there’s also a strain of seriousness in this opening scene, at least in what it has to say about Larry’s life and any lessons he could take from it. Despite essentially killing someone, the wife in this tale has no fear, since she is certain of her suspicions. The truth will be uncovered, and soon, but for the time being she undergoes no crises over this uncertainty, as once Groshkover exits their home the matter has been settled in her eyes. Ideally, this is how one’s life should be lived. Not through stabbing old men in the chest with ice picks, but without constantly doubting one’s perceptions and beliefs. The truth of whether or not the guest was a dybbuk can be viewed as this tale’s representation of death; until it happens, the only correct course of action is to trudge on without endless questioning.

Focusing on the answer to the question that this scenario poses misses out on what’s intriguing about it. To do so would be akin to reflecting on someone who has recently died and remarking on how pitiful their last 24 hours were, where they did not experience any great joys or changes in perspective and instead underwent many of the mundane experiences they’d grown accustomed to throughout their life. This perspective is useless, since it’s unknowable to the recently deceased, and assumes they possessed a slice of divine knowledge that none of us will ever gleam. Larry keeps searching for that divine truth fruitlessly, desperate to acquire a piece of information that will make sense of the absurdity of existence.

Characters all around him have seemingly embraced these matters, yet perish anyway, which seems to Larry to be yet more confirmation of how hopeless life is. When he watches an elderly man drop dead in front of him, Larry is incredibly shaken, yet the experience produces no positive emotions. While he shows the veneer of happiness immediately after this, wearing a dopey grin as he talks with a work colleague, he does not use this as an opportunity to reflect on how this wake-up call could cause him to develop a new perspective or change some of his behaviours. Instead, he wallows in despair, uttering a line that serves as a clever reincorporation of why Larry struggles so much in life.

When his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) announces that she wants a divorce, Larry claims that he hasn’t done anything. She agrees, though not in the positive way that this protagonist means it, as she is sick of living with someone who allows life to pass them by. So when he’s later asked by his colleague whether he’s published any academic material that could influence him to receive tenure, Larry is so aggrieved from watching a man die in front of him that he mournfully tells his co-worker that he hasn’t done anything. The way he sees it, he could drop dead tomorrow and his life would seem just as absurd as the visual of a seemingly healthy and lucid man falling like a sack of potatoes to the ground, never regaining consciousness.

The Coen Brothers have an extraordinary knack for eclectic filmmaking. While many of their films are period pieces, it’s a fact that’s very easy to forget given how specific each movie of theirs feels, where it gives the impression that no other director (or directors) could have crafted this unique vision, just as the story couldn’t work in any other timeline or setting. They are masters at offering unique perspectives and adapting their talents to different genres, while still retaining a consistent thematic and tonal vision in each project.

A Serious Man feels like a culmination of so much of their excellent work, as it’s entirely focused on perspective and what that means in the context of a ‘normal’ life. Larry has the opportunity to recognise that his is far from the only viewpoint on life throughout this film, but he continually refuses to recognise other people’s feelings. Even though it’s incredibly aggravating to watch Sy Ableman’s pathetic antics or Judith’s callousness, Larry’s passivity is also worthy of blame here. He’s often wandering through life helplessly, never taking the time to fix anything.

There are many contradictions in how Larry treats his life. Sometimes it seems as though his routine has left him with no time to think, such as when Judith announces that she wants a divorce. Larry, preoccupied with paperwork as he questions how their marriage could have fallen apart so irreparably, seems too busy to stop and consider how he can change the course of his life. Yet at the same time, he’s constantly questioning his place in the universe and trying to arrange meetings with rabbis to discuss these troubling questions. He seems to have all the time in the world to ponder his fate, but no opportunity to change his ways.

One would think that his agonising would leave him constantly despairing over his fate, but he’s also able (and willing) to sink into his everyday routine. When it comes to coping with the knowledge that people around him have died, he’s sometimes disturbed, and occasionally even faintly satisfied, not just with these events, but also with what they signify as part of God’s will. Larry has so much to be thankful for, yet has a whole host of problems that ensure he lives his life as if he’s barely keeping his head above water.

When he goes to the rabbis for guidance, they try to steer him away from these big questions and towards more mundane—but no less important—reflections, such as appreciating seemingly banal things in life and being a good person. These answers have no appeal whatsoever for Larry, who is convinced that there is some string of words that, when revealed to him, would make sense of his confusion.

Not only is this idea implicitly rejected by the religious leaders, but Larry also inadvertently repudiates this thought in one of his lectures. In it, he discusses the uncertainty principle, a complex and meticulously devised equation that ultimately amounts to the idea that nothing is certain. In other words, Larry has just spent a huge amount of time to conclude that there are no guarantees in life, a message that is continually reinforced throughout A Serious Man.

The problem that Larry faces is that he can’t view religion through the lens of mathematics, so he cannot be certain about life’s uncertainty. But when even this provokes doubt and unease, there is no foundation for the afflicted person’s beliefs to stand on. It throws into question whether or not the person in question believes anything. This guarantees that the smallest of inconveniences, and the greatest of joys and sorrows, seem almost equally significant, with Larry possessing no understanding of where or how to focus his pain and attention. If he just had something to believe in, like the husband or wife in the film’s opening tale, he could be fixed. Well, not fixed exactly, since his problems would stay the same, but he could give them the attention they deserve. In turn, this could reveal that they are all solvable.

Larry just doesn’t have any faith. On a fundamental level, he doesn’t believe that God has his back. And in a sense, he’s right not to, with all of these rabbis confirming his worst fears when they tell him that happiness isn’t guaranteed and that even suffering is part of God’s will. Larry could resolve to put all of his faith in God and drop dead at that very moment, and not only would his life be snuffed out, but the horror and tragedy of this moment would do nothing (at least, not in principle) to shake the faith of the rabbis. After all, if it’s God’s will, then it’s God’s will: there is no room for moralising or rationalising, just acceptance of something that the human mind struggles not to view as absurd.

Larry’s dreams are a similar whirl of confusion, like when he imagines himself consoling Arthur by the pool of the motel they’re staying at, only for Larry to give Arthur the money that his student tried to bribe him with. It seems that Arthur is destined for a storybook ending when the pair drive to a large body of water, which Larry’s brother will traverse by canoe so he can smuggle himself into Canada. Then, his distrustful neighbour appears out of nowhere, instructing his son to kill them both. This shocking and violent conclusion to Larry’s dream, which was preceded by a happy-go-lucky fairy tale, represents the tortured duality of this protagonist’s mind. He can only view existence through absolutes, shunning the more mundane beauty and horror that abound in everyday life.

Larry has become so shaken by these thoughts that at first it isn’t clear whether or not the pool interaction was real (it was). In this conversation, Arthur dwells on his failed life, dissecting all of the ways that Larry has achieved far more than he has, whether it’s through his career, his marriage, or the fact that he is a father. In a sense Arthur is right; he has much to envy about Larry’s life. It’s also true that Arthur’s existence is a pretty sad state of affairs in its own right, not least because he’s being persecuted for committing an act of sodomy, where even consensual sex is off-limits for gay men like him. But for as easy as this character is to pity, it’s also true that Arthur wakes up the next morning, and presses on, and wakes up the morning after that, and presses on again. His catastrophising, like Larry’s, belies the fact that their lives will continue to be a series of repetitions, with the occasional gear shift along the way.

Oftentimes in films, recurring motifs allow viewers to gain a greater degree of perspective on a story, where the reincorporated element suddenly adds to what the narrative depicts. The Jefferson Airplane song “Somebody to Love” has that purpose, bookending A Serious Man. It too challenges us to ask ourselves if anything has truly changed by the end of the film. Calamitous events might close out the movie, but has a significant or perspective-altering change occurred?

The answer is contradictory: yes and no. Life simply goes on, but at the same time it doesn’t; not for those who perish, and also not for people who experience such drastic change that it alters who they are. Oftentimes other people are as inscrutable as life itself, like Sy Ableman, who consoles Larry while secretly writing defaming, cutting complaints about him to his university. Other times the answer is staring Larry in the face, like his impending divorce, with this protagonist being too complacent in his routine to reflect on the feelings of his loved ones.

But they also seem quite unfeeling towards him. Despite how often we see family members interacting in A Serious Man, there are hardly any loving, tender, or even empathetic interactions between these characters. One could say that there’s not anything intrinsically wrong with this, since the film documents the minutiae of everyday life, and loving declarations aren’t said nearly as often in reality as they are in cinema. But therein lies just one of life’s tragedies that this film so keenly explores, with the beauty of this depiction being in how it can be viewed through a serious and comic lens.

The movie’s ending is the perfect culmination of everything the Coen Brothers have been going for throughout this tortured, hilarious experience. Despite Larry’s desperation to talk to rabbi Marshak, who is revered for being wise, he is consistently denied this opportunity, contributing to his feelings of despair. From what we can see in how Marshak talks with Larry’s son Danny (Aaron Wolff), it’s obvious that the rabbi’s teachings would only frustrate this protagonist. (But the elusiveness of not knowing continues to torture him. It poses an interesting question about disappointment in life, and whether it’s better to expect something fantastic that will never come your way, or learn that this revered dream is nothing more than a let-down.)

But Danny is still able to connect with Marshak’s message, which references Jefferson Airplane and being a good person. The key to enjoying life and learning to accept its absurdity is laid out in this message of basic goodness, as well as through the lyrics of “Somebody to Love”. The song’s verses and bridges seem to mirror Larry’s confusion, anger, and helplessness (with descriptions of flowers dying, the truth being deceptive, and people close to you only making you feel more alienated), while the chorus provides a simple solution for all of this hand-wringing: find someone to love.

What is less clear is how to interpret the film’s ending, which ties back to the essence of life’s meaning, and whether its joys and tragedies should be interpreted as random chance or divine intervention. Regardless of the conclusions one draws from these nagging questions, and how A Serious Man presents them, what is most impressive here is that it doesn’t feel as if the movie looks down on either viewpoint. The more one tries to imagine a work of art that comments extensively on religion without insulting a specific viewpoint on the existence of a higher power, the more impossible this task seems. It matters little whether provocation is the goal or not, as any indication of a specific belief will draw ire and disdain from members of other groups who don’t subscribe to such thinking.

The brilliance of A Serious Man is that when I watch its ending, at first I’m swayed by what I feel is the movie’s overall argument: that there are rules that simply can’t be crossed, and that doing so leads to a condemnation that goes beyond all our rationalisations and understanding. But then the comic absurdity—or cosmic absurdity—of this idea turns into a farcical, searing work of dark comedy, which pulls no punches in its ridicule of such beliefs. The two contradictory ideas are constantly vying for attention in my mind, with one slowly rising to the surface before being batted down by the other viewpoint.

But regardless of whether this film confirms or denies the existence of a higher power, the one through line between these opposing viewpoints it provides is that agonising over these questions only takes away from the joy that can be found in life. Belying easy answers, A Serious Man’s commitment to ambiguity in the face of these daunting questions makes it one of the most intriguing films of the 21st-century, complete with beautiful cinematography, a superb lead performance, and a seamless blend of comedy and drama.

UK • FRANCE • USA | 2009 | 106 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • YIDDISH • HEBREW

Cast & Crew

writers & directors: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen.
starring: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick, Aaron Wolff, Jessica McManus, Alan Mandell, Adam Arkin, George Wynter & Amy Landecker.