Joel and Ethan Coen enjoy a fairly ambivalent standing amongst today's audiences: Their films are widely beloved by the mainstream (to name a few: ""Fargo,"" ""The Big Lebowski"" and ""No Country for Old Men""), while the more self-consciously film-savvy crowd is deeply suspicious of their artistic motives. Indeed, the Coens are accused of being postmodern misanthropes just as often as they're called a great directorial duo. Their latest film, ""A Serious Man,"" will do little to convince either of these two opposed camps that the other has been right all along. Nevertheless, ""A Serious Man"" is a slick 105 minutes that presents quite a bit to chew on; the question is, what exactly does it taste like?
The moment that one begins to talk about ""A Serious Man,"" one finds oneself confronting Jewishness head-on. The film's only non-Jewish characters are a small family of über-Aryan blondies who have a not-so-latent anti-Semitic thing going on; because ""A Serious Man"" is set in the uniformly squashed suburbs of Minneapolis circa 1967, this Germanic-Semitic dialectic comes off as being slightly more plausible than it might otherwise. The events that unfold in this thoroughly Jewish environment abide by comic-strip logic, which shouldn't surprise anybody who has seen any of the Coens' previous works.
The story of ""A Serious Man"" concerns a woefully schmucky physics professor named Larry Gopnik who lives with his cranky, dysfunctional family in an eerily shtetl-like 'burb. Larry, whose area of expertise happens to be the dizzyingly complex mathematics underlying Erwin Schrödinger's famous ""cat in the box"" paradox, is subjected to one awful experience after another. Larry's bitchy wife leaves him for a noxiously sappy pillow of a man named Sy Ableman; an enigmatic Korean exchange student tries to bribe and then blackmail Larry for a passing grade; Larry's daughter's existence seems to consist of complaining and washing her hair, while his son's seems to consist of smoking weed, listening to Jefferson Airplane and pretending to work on his haftorah; Larry's brother is a cringe-inducing schmendrik who sleeps on the family's couch, nightly draining an enormous cyst on the back of his neck while working on ""the Mentaculus,"" a sort of probability-based Rosetta stone for compulsive gamblers. As you might imagine, all of this adds up to a crisis of faith for hapless Larry.
By now it should be rather obvious that ""A Serious Man"" is very much the product of a certain culture, one that the Coens assume their audience is at least slightly familiar with. Indeed, it's difficult to imagine that goys are going to derive much pleasure from the film's strongest passage, an ingenious meta-fable called ""The Goy's Teeth."" However, ""A Serious Man"" has something for everyone; Jews and gentiles alike will appreciate the Coens' knack for precise compositions, their fidelity to shot/reverse-shot structures and their wicked sense of humor, reflected in everything from the film's uncomfortably pale color scheme to their insistence on shoving every character up against the lens at one point or another, effectively emphasizing the inherent grotesqueness of all mankind. (It should be noted that the Coens don't discriminate when portraying people as hideous creatures.)
If there's one thing that keeps ""A Serious Man"" from scoring big, it's that the film doesn't take as many stylistic risks as it could. The uninspired soundtrack intrudes during scenes where it has no need to, and the Coens' aforementioned adherence to shot/reverse-shot actually works against the fragilely uneasy atmosphere that they otherwise succeed in conjuring.
So, then, is the Coens' reputation for being po-mo misanthropes justified? Probably; but if that misanthropy yields works as solid as ""A Serious Man,"" who really cares?
