A Serious Man - interpreting uncertainty

I have been a fan of the Coen Brothers' works ever since watching O Brother Where Art Thou?. The Coens, Ethan and Joel, write, direct and produce together, and over the years have turned out 14 films, most of them masterpieces. Among them some of my favourite films - O Brother Where Art Thou?, The Big Lebowski, Fargo and Barton Fink.

But this is a film that rises above all their previous works, outstanding though they all were, and steeped in Jewish wisdom. A Serious Man is a film that haunts - torments even - in the search for meaning, a search that rises beyond the work itself but prompts one to ask deeper questions - of life itself.

A good film is one that you find yourself thinking about the day after you've seen it. A great film is one that stays with you, intruding upon your consciousness, clicking with your day-to-day life, yielding quotable quotes you find yourself using regularly, and prompting you to see it again and again. A Serious Man I first watched on DVD. A few weeks later I watched it in the cinema with Moni. She was so taken with it that she bought the DVD when in England, and we watched it yet again on her return. Then another cinema viewing. I then recommended the film to my brother, who watched the DVD twice over a weekend - and then wrote me several e-mails about it. Many of the ideas below we chewed over together. Here is our interpretation.

Life, God, Certainty, Our Changing Times.
A Serious Man opens with a seemingly unrelated tale, set in Poland at the very beginning of the 20th Century. Velvel, a Jewish trader returns to his shtetl home on winter's night and tells his wife Dora (in Yiddish of course) that his cart broke on the Lublin road, and that he was assisted by Traitle Groshkover, an old family friend upon whom he chanced. His wife tells him that Groshkover died of typhus three years ago; the man must have been a dybbuk. Just then, a knock at the door and standing there is Groshkover himself. Dora then tries to prove that he is a dybbuk, finally stabbing him with an icepick. Groshkover laughs and appears unharmed, but then blood begins to stain his white shirt. He stumbles out of the house into the snowstorm - we are never to know whether or not he was a dybbuk. Uncertainty - a leitmotif of the film.

Cut from Poland in 1900 to Minnesota in 1967. The continuity of Jews' wanderings, a diaspora that leads from eastern Europe to the Great Plains, is implied. So are the massive changes of the first two-thirds of the 20th century; from shtetl to ranch-style bungalow with modern conveniences, TV, hi-fi, electric oven; from horse cart to Detroit steel and rock'n'roll radio. But the overarching continuity is to be found in Hebrew School, where the main part of the film begins; in the Yiddish song Der Milner's Trern which our protagonist listens to; at the synagogue; and in Rabbi Marshak, who like the school teacher Turchik is old enough to remember the shtetl in the times of Velvel and Dora. Change - is another leitmotif of the film. "The old order changeth, yielding to the new," said Withnail's Uncle Monty, quoting Tennyson's La Morte D'Arthur. The new order is one of uncertainty. It is into this changing world that the film's protagonist, physics professor Larry Gopnik is thrown. In O Brother Where Art Thou, "everybody's looking for answers". In The Man Who Wasn't There, we are hearing the question "What kind of a man are you?" In A Serious Man, the repeated question is "What's going on?" We go a step further into the existentialism that lies at the heart of the Coens' film-making.

Larry Gopnik is a schmuck, a schlemiel, a putz; not a macher. After being introduced to him getting checked up in a doctor's surgery, we first see him in action in a comical pose, backside stuck out to a classful of students as he writes on the bottom edge of a huge blackboard, trousers slightly too short.

We are invited to compare him physically to Sy Ableman, the serious man, the macher, who is in the process of taking Larry's wife away from him. Sy is tall, big, bearded, bald and deep-voiced. An alpha male, whose body courses with more testosterone then Larry's. Larry Gopnik is shorter, smaller, clean shaven with a higher-pitched voice. Sy know what he wants. Larry ums and ahs and vacillates ("No - I well, yes, okay" to Dick Dutton; "No - I well, yeah! Sometimes! Or, I don't know!" he tells Rabbi Nachtner). Sy initiates, Larry reacts. Sy drives a range-topping Cadillac; Larry a low-suds Dodge. Sy's name as well as suggesting Ability (Able-man) suggests sophisticated German or Austrian provenance rather than the shtetl that a Gopnik would have harked from. No wonder Larry's wife Judith prefers the widowed Sy to her husband. ['Gopnik' is Russian slang for the under-class rabble, a chav, hołota]

Larry is an outsider in his own fractured family. His wife wants him out, his kids don't care and his brother Arthur has high-functioning autism. Unable to fend for himself, Arthur lives with Larry's family, sleeps on the couch, and occupies the bathroom to daughter Sarah's annoyance. Larry can only realise himself at work, within the cloistered world of the local university's physics faculty. Larry, although intelligent, is a loser even before the Coens' narrative begins to unleash a torrent of woes upon him.

The film is said to be a modern retelling of the biblical Book of Job. It's about a man whose suffering tests his belief in God. In the film, Job's three friends - the three people kindly disposed towards Larry - are Arlen Finkle, the head of the university tenure committee; Don Milgram, Larry's lawyer, and Mimi Nudell, who offers him advice at Lake Nokomis.

"What have I done? I haven't done anything!" he tells his wife Judith when she tells him she wants a divorce. This line is echoed elsewhere: "That's right! I haven't done anything!" he tells Dick Dutton of Columbia Record Club, and when Arlen asks Larry whether there's anything else he's done that can be used to support his tenure application. "I haven't done anything," Larry says. Kindly Arlen - who's rooting for Larry to get the tenure - replies "Don't worry - Doing nothing is not bad, ipso facto".

O but it is.

It is for doing nothing that God has been punishing Larry. If indeed, there is a God.

"I am not an evil man", wails Larry to Arlen.

"I'm a serious - I'm, uh, I've tried to be a serious man," says Larry to Rabbi Marshak's secretary as he unsuccessfully tries to get an audience with the learned sage.

Sorry, Larry, not good enough.

If God exists, then God is punishing Larry for coasting, for being passive, for taking the line of least resistance to life, for being indifferent to the presence of his growing children. For being a passive husband and father. (Contrast the active fatherhood of his goy next-door-neighbour, Gar Brandt with Larry's near-indifference to what his children are up to.) As head of household, Larry lacks any authority. The family is seated around the dinner table. "We should wait [for Arthur]," he tells the family, all ready to start eating. "Are you kidding?" is the response. They all tuck in regardless. Larry's authority is zero.

So we are invited to question Rashi's words with which the film opens: "Accept everything that happens to you with simplicity". Should we? ("Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be/Famine, war, disaster, disease and poverty" to misquote Sir Paul McCartney.) Mere acceptance of mystery (as advocated by the Korean student's father) leads to moral compromise. "Actions always have consequences", Larry tells Clive. Indeed they do. And so does inaction. But Rashi's words "Accept everything that happens to you with simplicity" have another meaning in the context of this film. Larry dwells on everything that happens to him. He thinks and thinks - and when that yields no answers, he asks the rabbis to place his existentialist crises into a religious context. More thinking, still no answers. Rashi is saying 'don't interpret'. "When the truth is found to be lies, and all the hope inside you dies - then what?" asks Rabbi Marshak of Danny. A question that Larry should have been asked. 'What to do?' rather than 'Why's this happened?'

The centrepiece of the film for me is the Goy's Teeth scene, in which Rabbi Nachtner attempts to answer Larry's question about what God is trying to tell us. All to the sounds of Jimi Hendrix's Machine Gun, superbly framed and edited. Six minutes of cinematographic excellence. The goy in the Rabbi's anecdote is called Russell Kraus (note the spelling. One 's' in the original 2007 screenplay). If a movie about art had a character called "Picasso Braque" we'd instantly know who was being referred to. Here, it's Bertrand Russell and Karl Kraus. The link between the British mathematician-philosopher and the Austrian writer is the Austrian-British philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. [Both Kraus and Wittgenstein were Jews who converted to Christianity.] Stretching a point? Ethan Coen studied philosophy at Princeton and his senior thesis was Two views of Wittgenstein's later philosophy.

The devil is doubt. Uncertainty. The Uncertainty Principle is what Larry Gopnik is lecturing about, which he illustrates it with the thought-experiment of Schrödinger's Cat. The cat is both alive and dead until the observer opens the box. God exists and God doesn't exist - simultaneously. We don't know for sure until we die. The devil is doubt. Uncertainty is the devil. Larry thinks himself to pieces rather than doing something.

Don Milgram - the surname brings to mind the Milgram Experiment, devised by Yale University's Stanley Milgram as a response to the Adolf Eichmann trial. How much pain can you inflict upon someone because you are ordered to? 

Key scenes, key dialogues.
Sy Ableman's death and funeral. It is implied (though you might not catch this on first viewing) that Sy Ableman has his (fatal) car crash at exactly the same time as Larry Gopnik has his (minor) one. Judging by the set-up on the road, one can guess that Sy's impetuous, risk-taking alpha nature prompts him to cut across the unending stream of traffic on the blind corner into the path of a speeding car. Sy gets it from God too. But for totally different reasons than Larry. For being a bullying adulterer, for one. For impatience. For being too active (when Larry is too passive). For doing wrong (rather than doing nothing). The two men's fates are my message from the film: achieve a life of balance.

The structure of the opening and closing sequences echo the structure of a Bach fugue. From the first shot of the main part of the film(inside Danny's ear canal) to the closing one (impending tornado) we have two bracketing sets of sequences, cutting between Danny and Larry (Danny at school, Larry at the doctor's; finally Larry in his office intercut with Danny at school). There are six such intercuts at the beginning and six at the end.

And note the grade-changing scene in this sequence. 'F' erased, replaced with a... 'C'... minus. Phone rings. Cut to Danny's class. And only after the cut back to the ringing telephone do we learn it's Dr Shapiro with some bad, bad news for Larry. "In this office, actions have consequences. Always". Larry, instant karma's gonna get you.

The funeral. We cut from the final line of the classic Goy's Teeth scene to the synagogue. Rabbi Nachtner: "The goy? ... Who cares?" [cut to ] "Sy Ableman was a serious man... " Rabbi Natchner praises Sy to an absurd degree "A tzadik, who knows, maybe even a Lamid Vovnik". Comparing this pompous, home-breaking, self-important egotist to one of the 36 righteous people who protect the world against evil - is stretching a point so far that no one in the congregation who knew Sy could take ever Rabbi Nachtner seriously.

The roof scene - the aerial - tuning into signals from the ether as he catches sight of Mrs Samsky next door sunbathing nude, Bathsheba to Larry's David. As biblical as we can get. If we know the story. The connection is also between Mrs Samsky and Eve, tempting Larry's Adam with drugs and sex.

The pool scene - "It's all shit, Larry" - Arthur has finally broken and fallen into despair. Doubt has conquered. He and Larry are comparing whose life is more miserable. Is it worse to have nothing or to have something and have it taken away?

Dem Milner's Trern - [The Miller's Tears] Sung by Sidor Belarsky, a song about an old Jewish miller expelled from his village in Russia. We hear it when Larry is expelled from his marital bedroom to the living room couch (mirroring the pogroms and the Jews' expulsion to the Pale of Settlement), and again when Larry is cast out further still to the Jolly Roger (the Jewish diaspora to the New World).

The Bar Mitzvah scene - Danny, out of his box... the suspense of will he make it or not... he stumbles, the scratchy yod... he stutters... but he finds his voice and starts reciting the Torah portion. The curse is momentarily broken. Larry and Judith hold hands, seemingly reconciled. But for how long?

Let's take a look at Danny and what he and his generation represents. This would be the viewpoint of the teenage Coen brothers, this is what they saw around them in 1967 Jewish Minnesota. This highly personal take on events (in effect placing their experience centre stage in a world in flux) ensures that this is by far their most meaningful film to date. The goings-on in the film are what happens when the rock'n'roll fuelled Pandora's box was opened by the counter-culture revolution of the 1960s. Wine, women and song give way to sex and drugs and rock and roll. The youth counter-culture steamrollers the memory of intellectual, Jewish fin-de-siècle Vienna. Foul mouthed youths with no respect for their elders or siblings. The Gopnik's son-and-heir is on the road to nowhere. Authority and certainty are dead.

The tornado heading towards Danny and his classmates is a metaphor. It's the maelstrom heading the way of their (and the Coens') entire generation. Haight-Ashbury, Vietnam, drugs, social breakdown, Watergate, inner city decay, AIDS, 9/11, climate change. The Old Certainties of conservative middle-class middle America that Larry's generation inherited will melt away in Danny's.

And this tornado threatens the Jewish state too. For the film is set in mid-May 1967. The calendar in Rabbi Scott's office is open on May-June 1967. Larry's had 14 days to listen to Santana Abraxas and the June selection is Cosmo's Factory [both actually 1970 LPs]. The Six-Day War is about to kick off. A war with which Egypt's President Nassar intended to "wipe Israel off the face of the earth".

The Coens, like many of mankind's great storytellers and entertainers, are Jewish. The Simpsons (Matt Groening) runs rich with Jewish wisdom, as do the films of Steven Spielberg and Mike Leigh[bermann]. And John Landis (Animal House, Blues Brothers). Sitting through Hebrew School or yeshiva, is not just a question of mindlessly reciting Torah portions (the take we get in A Serious Man); it is about discussing the wisdom with the rabbi, interpretation of the interpretation.

For my generation, slightly younger, raised in Polish West London in the '60s and '70s, the parallels are there; the portrayal of the Hebrew School reminded me of our Polish Saturday school, (Ivrit! / Po polsku!) the community-shared rites of passage in the Polish church, our interspersing of Polish words into our English conversation, our Polish doctor and Polish dentist.

This is a film that will delight Intellectual Nerds of a Certain Age, (INCAs) who've outgrown seeking interpretations of infantile comic-book derived movies, and who face mid-life existentialist problems of their own. (Are the equations written out by Larry Gopnik on the blackboard scientifically correct? What are the alphabetic equivalents of Dick Dutton's and Sy Ableman's respective phone numbers? Does it matter? I think the Coens would say "no - it's not that obvious". In fact, I don't think they've considered these things to the depths that fans of this film have - which is good. It's not their job to pontificate on their films - only to keep on making new ones. The pontification is left to INCAs and JINCAs (Jewish INCAs). Type in "A Serious Man" + interpretation into Google, and today you get a 574,000 - over half a million - results.

My recommended reviews of A Serious Man:

David Poland (on video - well-balanced Jewish perspective)
Metaphilm (Pushing the interpretative limits)
Fr. Robert Barron (a Catholic priest's perspective on video)
Filmwell on religion in the film
Eric Lundgard, Minnesotan goy
Exploding Kinetoscope: Taking it seriously
Only the Cinema: One big cosmic joke?
Cinema Styles: Order and Uncertainty
Kevin Miller: In the Luxury of Reflection
Coosa Creek: Deep thoughts
Jonathan Friedman: Theodicy and God's Wrath
Todd Alcott: What does the protagonist want?
Getafilm Review: Nor martyr, nor hero, nor crook