"A Serious Man" (2009)

For physics professor Larry Gopnik, life has become a series of cruel, random events. His apathetic students would rather bribe him than study. His brat children barely speak to him. Someone's sending anonymous hate-mail to his tenure board. His increasingly psychotic brother keeps getting arrested. The neighbors keep advancing on his property line. His shrewish wife wants a divorce. And no matter how many doctors, lawyers and rabbis he consults, he never gets a straight answer: "What does it all mean?" he asks; "What should I do?"



So Larry Gopnik does nothing. He neither reports the bribe nor accepts it. He's too busy to understand his kids. He submits nothing to the board of tenure ("I haven't published"). He tells his brother to work on his problems, although Gopnik declines to work on his own. He avoids his neighbors. When asked what he wants to do about his impending divorce, he answers, "I want things to go back to the way they were... No... I don't know." He is upset by the confusion of change, but remains so alienated from his community and himself that he cannot feel, or move forward productively.

The title of the film is "A Serious Man." "I'm trying to be a serious man," cries Gopnik, begging for one rabbi's clarity. But what does it mean to be "serious," and what do we look for in "clarity"?

Gopnik - spoiler alert - never will have the clarity he seeks. The movie-goer, however, is privy to two parables about "meaning" that more or less stop the show. The first, told before the title credits, prompts the audience to take sides: Is this a meaningful universe in which we must trust in and obey God's will, or is life chaotic, rendered meaningful only by our own moral actions? The second parable asks us to draw on our own interpretation of the first: If you found something extraordinary - say, markings on the back of a gentile's teeth that spelt out, in Hebrew, "help me" - would you take it as evidence of God's personal message to yourself, or would it seem a freakish coincidence you could nonetheless use as a reminder to lead a moral life?

These considerations of morality, and of faith vs. chaos, continue until the Hamlet-like protagonist finally decides to take a moral action - with consequences. At the same moment, his cats-in-the-cradle son will similarly finally take a moral action - with consequences. Whether or not these consequences are ordained by a just God or merely coincidental will depend on the movie-goer's interpretation of reality - and of the film.

This is a fucking awesome movie. It is a conversation-starter, for one, and, more importantly, is the first period drama to use Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love" as an epiphanous statement without coming off as vapid. "A Serious Man" is also, natch for the Coen brothers, hilarious. It is their most personal movie - a movie they've said to have based on their own father, a movie that takes place in their own late-60s childhood Minneapolis, a movie about Jewish identity and faith. It is dark, and cruel, and random, and funny, and it works. You can go see this film, or you can go see "Couples Retreat" and kick yourself. Your choice: morality vs. faith via the Coens, or Vince Vaughn in a swimsuit via a guy who was in two episodes of "Punky Brewster."