A Serious Man

Reviewed by John David Ebert

Though I’ve never reviewed any of their movies on this site, the Coen brothers are among my favorite filmmakers. Their films are remarkably free from the kinds of flaws that plague the work of other directors, especially of the Hollywood type, for cliches, sentimentality and kitsch are rare occurrences in a Coen brothers film. And they have possibly the most sophisticated and developed sense of irony that cinema has seen since the days of Stanley Kubrick. To watch a Coen brothers film is to watch an unfolding cascade of novelties, originality and good writing pour forth with a freshness and disregard of convention that is virtually unmatched in cinematic history.

A Serious Man, just out on DVD, is their most recent film, and also one of their best. It is a loose reworking of the story of Job, centered around a Jewish physics professor named Larry Gopnik who suddenly hits a run of bad luck in his life: his wife is cheating on him and reveals that she wants a divorce; one of his students, from South Korea, bribes him to get him to change his grade to a passing one and threatens legal action against him when he baulks; he can’t get rid of  his lay-about brother, who sleeps on his couch and spends his time gambling and visiting prostitutes; his racist neighbor gives him dirty looks; and his other neighbor sunbathes nude while mocking his interest in her.

In order to find an explanation for all these things which befall him, Gopnik goes to visit in succession three rabbis, each of whom offers him advice that is almost worthless. He can’t explain his life and neither can they. He’s basically a good person, so why does he seem to be the constant butt of some cosmic joke played out at his expense? This was Job’s question, too, and God’s answer was simply to bully him into submitting to the mysterious whims of a capricious and moody God who says he can basically inflict suffering on whomever he wants and because he is God, he more or less doesn’t have to give any accountability for his actions to any mere human.

And the answer which the Coen brothers give is something similar: sometimes shit just happens. For no particular reason. Sometimes in our lives, we hit such periods of bad luck: they happen to just about everyone sooner or later who lives long enough. And the character of such periods is not so much their seeming randomness, but rather the feeling which they induce that the cosmos is specifically out to get you. You. And nobody else.

But this, of course, is an illusion, since bad luck happens to everyone. There’s no particular reason why the gods are raining on your parade. They piss on everyone’s parade, because humans, as is well known, are but the playthings of the gods. The same way insects are objects of torment and fascination to the children who pull their legs off just to see what they will do.

Of course, this is a nihilistic vision of the world and one which the human soul resists. Let’s face it: we would rather believe that the gods had singled us out for suffering because at least that would mean the cosmos isn’t indifferent to us but has taken notice of us the way God one day took notice of Job’s perfectly pious behavior. Behavior that was so disgustingly pious, God took offense to it.

It is interesting, though, that the Coen brothers show us Gopnik giving lectures to  his pupils on the paradoxes and indeterminacies of quantum theory: he discourses on the paradox of Schrodinger’s cat and claims that he doesn’t understand it, but that the math makes sense. He also discusses Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, layering the blackboard in a dense mesh of matrix mathematics.

In the postmodern world, we aren’t certain of anything anymore. One of its supreme characteristics is a basic hesitancy to pronounce certainty on anything at all, whether we are thinking of Derrida’s famous undecidables or the general trend toward dismissing master narratives with their authoritative and final answers to everything in its right place, as the Radiohead song goes. In the novels of Thomas Pynchon, there might be conspiracies behind historical events. . .or there might not. He gives us just enough evidence to make the case either way and that is why his novels are so brilliant.

The Coen brothers seem to be saying that a breakdown in the intellectual sphere–from the rise of statistical probabilities in thermodynamics to uncertainty in quantum mechanics–not only corresponds to, but also gives rise to a breakdown in the social sphere. If we can’t be certain about anything at the highest levels of society–the levels of Truth and Values– then the trickle down effect is such that we can’t even be certain about the micro-events that make up our lives. Is there a purpose behind our suffering?

The film itself ends with a characteristic note of uncertainty as a tornado approaches and Gopnik receives a disturbing phone call from his doctor regarding the necessity for a private discussion of his most recent X-rays.

Do we suffer for a reason, or is it all just really random?

Their answer?

Who knows!?

That’s the kind of Age we’re living in.