A Serious Man

The blackly comic new Coen film brought home just how disappointing Burn After Reading actually was: broad, loud and populated by dislikeable idiots (with the odd flash of hilarity) This time round there's no big names, no manic gurning. Low key and one of the Coens' more inscrutable efforts, A Serious Man begins - in Yiddish (fair weather fans leave now!) - in a 19th century shtetl, with an encounter between a married couple and an elderly man who may, or may not, be a dybbuk. It gets steadily stranger. In the 1960s Larry Gopnik seems a nice enought guy, though placid to a fault, when suddenly he finds himself assailed on all sides (by God? fate? pure coincidence?) The unctuous Sy Ableman steals his wife, and in a late discreet aside it's suggested he's also responsible for sending poisonous letters to Larry's faculty; Larry's oddball brother (and his cyst) has taken up semi-permanent residence in the bathroom, much to the annoyance of Larry's daughter who clearly wants that position for herself and her endless hair washing; and the Columbia Record Club keep hounding him for money for records *he* has never received, though it turns out his son is far more devious than himself. The only purposes in Larry's life seem to be to provide money upon demand. no matter how unreasonable the request, and to fix the TV aerial so his son can watch F Troop. Oh, and throw in a trio of variously unhelpful rabbis. All of which eventually provokes even the infuriatingly docile Larry to exasperation and tears. It could have felt horribly cruel if it wasn't for the sympathy we feel for Larry, surrounded as he is by a world out to get him (a hilarious nightmare sees his redneck neighbours out hunting Jews instead of the usual wildlife). The filmmaking contrasts with the chaos afflicting Larry. It's calm and controlled, with pyrotechnics saved for moments like a stoned boy's experience of his bar mitzvah. And how does all this relate to the opening? Who knows? You could view Larry and his wife as extensions of the couple in the prologue (easygoing and skeptical husband, forceful and brutally pragmatic wife) but no concrete answers - to anything - are forthcoming, and the double whammy of doctor's phonecall and approaching tornado that ends the film hardly ties up loose ends. Definitely a Coen film to mull over during those many repeat viewings.