Joel & Ethan Coen
A Serious Man

The 2007-2010 quadrennium was undoubtedly the most productive for the Coen brothers. The third work in 3 years, after the postmodern western No Country for Old Men and the spy story parody Burn After Reading, is yet another total shift in genre and setting. A Serious Man is, for the first time, a dramatic film without the noir influences that had previously made the duo famous. It is also a film in which the two brothers pour a part of their lives: both because it is set in the late '60s in St. Louis Park, the brothers' hometown and the historical period when the two were children, and because all the themes, events, and sometimes the language of the film is Jewish-themed, the Coen family's original religion.
The film transports us into the two most turbulent, almost Fantozzi-like weeks of the life of a physics professor, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg): it's a very important period because his son Danny is about to have his bar mitzvah, and he is also expecting a long-awaited promotion at work, but everything seems to be falling apart. His children constantly steal money from him, his brother Arthur (Michael Stuhlbarg) is living at home permanently and has legal issues, a Korean student tries to bribe him for a passing grade and accuses him of defamation, and as if that weren't enough, his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) leaves him for a family friend, Sy Abelmann (Fred Melamed), and besides wanting a divorce, she kicks him out of the house. With the certainties of a lifetime gone, Larry tries to find an explanation in religion and turns to three rabbis, with results that are anything but positive. And even when things seem to be turning for the better, bigger troubles are always in sight... The only certainty in life is the absence of certainties, as mathematically explained by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (so dear to the Coens) that the protagonist explains in a scene. Larry Gopnik is the modern representation of the biblical Job, the righteous man who suffers without fault; he is another example of the Coenian anti-hero, but with a notable difference: while The Dude, Ed Crane, or Llewelyn Moss "got into trouble" on their own, Larry has tried all his life to follow the path of righteousness and common sense, to be a serious man, and he knows he has never done anything wrong (as he affirms several times during the film); it is Chaos that has targeted him with a series of sudden and tragicomic misfortunes, and he believes that his God has put him to the test, but without understanding what to do to get out of it. The rabbis, like all other manifestations of the Jewish world, from the Yiddish school to the bar mitzvah, are the medium through which the two brothers give us their opinion on religion: empty, incapable of helping man, and reduced to a series of practices with no purpose. The Coens' goliardic tone comes out through the character of Danny (in whose transgressiveness to the rules they may have put a part of themselves) who faces the bar mitzvah, after smoking some joints, in a scene between the hallucinatory and the dreamlike, or who spends hours at school listening to the Jefferson Airplane. The rabbis Larry turns to are the epitome of the discrediting of religion that the Coens perform, dedicated only to using enigmatic metaphors or useless tales, good only to confuse Larry even more. And how not to define as genius the conversation Danny will have with the elder rabbi, whose virtues are repeatedly praised throughout the film, and from whom the viewer expects solemn truths: what he will say is nothing but "When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies... What do you do?" (taken from the opening two verses of Somebody to Love by Jefferson Airplane), followed by a laconic "Be a good boy".
The film presents many other Jewish references, both musically and in terms of plot devices, including "the story within the story" typical of Yiddish tales and used by the second rabbi; additionally, the film opens with a prologue, a Yiddish tale unrelated to the rest of the story, set in Poland in an indeterminate era; it is a dedication to Jewish writer Isaac B. Singer. The film seems to return to the directors' beginnings, with unpolished settings, semi-unknown actors, and a medium-slow pace. The performances of the actors are excellent, their dialogues so normal and comic (Woody Allen is an obvious yet precise comparison), particularly the protagonist's performance, and the cinematography is also excellent, giving a grayish patina to the whole film, which fits well with the mediocrity of suburban American life portrayed.
A great film, less sparkling and without situations that immediately stick in memory, but also less commercial and mainstream than the previous ones, full of very deep meanings and reflections, dense with a nihilism that cannot fail to touch even those who do not have faith or are not trying to be a serious man. VOTE = 7