Pondering life, death and God in “A Serious Man”
“Why does [Hashem] make us feel the questions if he’s not gonna give us any answers?”
This question, which protagonist Larry Gopnik asks of his spiritual leader, Rabbi Nachtner, encapsulates the central challenge of the Coen brothers’ “A Serious Man,” their latest tragicomedy.
“He hasn’t told me,” the rabbi replies.
Indeed, if this is the question that the movie is trying to answer, the rabbi’s response seems to also mirror the movie’s answer.
The film opens with an enigmatic scene, unconnected to the rest of the movie, depicting a Jewish couple living in Old World Poland. They receive a visitor whom the wife, Dora, believes to have died years ago and takes as an evil spirit but whom her husband, Velvel, welcomes without suspicion. Dora, however, stabs him with an ice pick. When Velvel laments Dora’s actions, she says, “Blessed is the Lord. Good riddance to evil.”
And so, the couple learns that they cannot divine God’s plans, and that they stand at His mercy.
The plot follows in like fashion, turning Gopnik—a professor in Jewish suburban Minnesota—into a human punching bag for the force of fate: he loses his wife, faces legal troubles, is unable to help his dysfunctional brother, feuds with his neighbor and struggles with money.
Struggling to understand why these things are happening to him, Larry goes to rabbi after rabbi to find the answer. He never does. The rabbis’ jocular anecdotes, including a peculiar one about a dentist who finds Hebrew letters engraved in a patient’s teeth, fail to amuse Larry, making him wonder even more.
“I don’t want it to just go away; I want the answer,” he says to a rabbi who suggests that, in time, Larry will stop wondering.
Despite these frustrations, the movie is foremost a comedy. Larry loses a lot but the Coen brothers send the message that such is life. Much of the film is funny—for instance, we see Larry teetering precariously on his rooftop to catch a glimpse of his attractive neighbor, who is sunbathing nude in her backyard, or trying to explain to one of his students that bribing him for a better grade just isn’t acceptable.
The first scene after the opening also draws laughs; it shows Larry’s son Danny trying to get through a boring Hebrew class by listening to music while the teacher screams conjugations at the listless students.
Larry’s trials would not seem so tragic were the movie to end happily, because the conflicts would be resolved. But it does not, and by the end the film turns quickly from comedy to tragedy.
In many ways, this movie is excellent: the acting is flawless, the plotline engaging, and the cinematography intriguing. The blend of comedy and tragedy—black comedy—is a difficult genre to pull off, but the Coen brothers excel at it. The film’s humor is subtle and dry, and makes viewers smile and think about the idiosyncrasies of Jewish culture.
Larry, for instance, has a nightmare about his neighbor and neighbor’s son, who are avid hunters and stereotypical American WASPs. In the dream, the boy and his father are out on a hunting trip when they come across Larry and his brother. The boy shoots Larry’s brother, and the father says, “Look son, there’s another Jew!”
But despite all of the tragedy and comedy, or perhaps because of it, “A Serious Man” lacks a resolution. The film’s ironic ending gives the impression that the Coen brothers are having a big laugh at our expense, and upon leaving the theater viewers may be left wondering: as enjoyable as the movie was, what were they supposed to glean from it?
If anything, the point of the movie is that life has no point, and this fatalistic attitude may not seem right to our feel-good sensibilities. Maybe we would have been comforted with an extra scene after the credits—something to prove that even when you lose everything, everything is not lost.
Perhaps the mark of an excellent film, however, is its ability to disturb its audience and question some fundamental assumptions about life—that God is watching over us, that things happen for a reason, or that good things happen to good people. The Coen Brothers do not give viewers the satisfaction of a packaged, pretty ending, and the empty feeling viewers may have as the credits roll is the knowledge that sometimes, things just do not turn out right.
