A Serious Man stars Michael Stuhlbarg, whom I have had an enormous crush on since Boardwalk Empire. I also heard that it was a modern retelling of the Book of Job, and I love a Bible movie regardless of quality. If the latter piques your interest, I would dissuade you from seeing this film solely based on that characterization, but when the movie ended, I was sorely tempted to rewatch the entire film. I settled for just rewatching a handful of scenes. I loved it though there were definitely things that I would love to tweak about the way that the story was depicted or at least get them to elaborate on if a director’s commentary exists.
Stuhlbarg plays Larry Gopnik, a physics professor, husband and father. He is not even in the opening sequence, which is terrific and made me view the entire film as a horror comedy film. One later sequence even reminded me of The Silence of the Lambs denouement with creating tension regarding the identity of who will choose the right door. It did not hurt that the opening sequence shared the same supernatural territory as one of my favorite horror films, Demon. Viewers who practice Judaism will definitely have an advantage over the rest of us because the film unapologetically exists in a predominantly Jewish space and delightfully never explains itself with an awkward prose dump.
Counterintuitively Larry is not the titular character in A Serious Man. In many ways, Larry is not the star of his movie and is more like a Dickens character that helplessly gets tossed around because of the actions of more interesting supporting characters. Larry is paralleled specifically with his son, David. The movie begins in a mysterious, vast, dark space, which reminded me of the subsequently released Uncut Gems. We later discover that this space is actually the inside of their bodies, but instead of the eyes as the windows to the soul, it is the ears, and the meaning of life may be found in a lyric. If Larry has a problem, then he is initially unaware of it, and by the end of the film, still has not figured it out, but the secret lies in whom he is additionally paralleled with, his son’s Hebrew teacher, a man in love with the subject, but completely alone in the crowd of unengaged students blissful in his lack of actual human connection and actually failing in his job, to infect the students with his love and understanding. The students are an inconvenience, not the point.
A Serious Man’s Larry is a man rich in community, but poor in spirit. He is happily alone and made miserable when people finally puncture his bubble. People are problems. They have always been there, but they are pieces of paper that he can ignore until they begin to successfully invade his space, his office, starting with a Korean student, even more of a cultural outsider than Larry, who at least lives in a Jewish community. (I would love to know how Korean viewers feel about this film and the Coen Brothers’ use of a Korean character.) Then the damn breaks, and people are no longer compartmentalized in their tidy spaces, but infect the personal with the business then vice versa until there is almost no room for him. He reminded me of Dexter in the way that they both never have space to breathe, but others besiege them with their needs and invade their space. Whereas Dexter violently reclaims his space and asserts his needs, we never experience such catharsis for Larry, which would obviously take a different form considering the difference in their personalities and surroundings. There is never a satisfying moment when even his lawyer stands up for him, successfully articulates Larry’s position and reclaims his space. In contrast, Marshak, who is presented as the mysterious, wisest, oldest person in the film, has no problem with claiming his space by surrounding himself with people who respect his space and activities.
David, who is on the threshold of being a man, benefits from being able to compare and contrast two possible paths in deciding whom he will be: the path of his father, a rational, but harried and ultimately unsatisfactory, solitary life or the path of Marshak, which embraces the mystery of the moment and meaning of life in its most quotidian and irreverent form, alone but still engaged. There is a point where Larry decides to confront David then is struck silent when Larry sees his son sitting in front of the television and stuck at the threshold, not permitted to enter or disturb, as if David has access to a Holy of Holies that Larry cannot occupy. David’s use of drugs and unabashed embrace of popular culture is depicted as just as mystical and holy as Marshak’s office and surroundings. It is as if the Coen Brothers are suggesting that the meaning of life is not in the answers that the story provides, but the immersion and joy of the story. When the reward or the moral becomes the point, then it commodifies the connection between the storyteller and the audience, the experience of living another’s life. Larry never truly understands that in his interaction with his student, who asserts that he understands the story, not the math whereas Larry does not understand the story and is uncomfortable with uncertainty. David has the capacity for community and connection with the eternal and his community, but will he?
Larry is eternally single in a way that transcends his reality. He is always an outsider and alone except he briefly connects in a way that is not hostile with Mrs. Samsky, whom Amy Landecker plays brilliantly and is almost unrecognizable. One reviewer characterizes her as sex-crazy, but that is not accurate. She is also alone and immersed in her existence, naked and unashamed, consuming pot, which in this film is another way to enter the mystical, eternal realm. She could be an Eve, pre-Edenic figure, especially considering how her backyard is fenced in. If Larry is lecherous David in his heart, it does not mean that she is Bathesheba. The outside world leaves her largely untouched though she does exist in it. He also has moments of genuine connection with his brother, but connection is represented as a nightmare for him. Anytime he connects with someone without getting something in return, or someone wanting something from him, he wakes up in terror. Simple human interaction is equated with death for him. Indeed none of the other women in the film have existential crisis or a need for the mystical because they already are on the path to the meaning of life, even if that specific path is ridiculous.
A Serious Man’s denouement is perfect. The movie is deliciously symmetrical in the way that it makes the viewers feel as if Larry and David are back on the track of their lives whereas the movie was an inconvenient bump on the road; however in retrospect the tribulations that they bemoaned seem like nothing or comical in comparison to what they have to face. It ends on a Biblically epic open-ended note. Is it punishment or inevitability?
