Have you thought about getting a lawyer?
Movies by Joel and Ethan Coen have a way of leaving me quiet in my seat, feeling
like a dunce. Does anything make you feel more of an outsider than being part of
an audience of laughing people while the humor flies right past your
uncomprehending brain? Until, that is, “A Serious Man.”
Professor
Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) has tried to do the right thing at every turn
in his life and suddenly, life turns on him. Piece by piece his carefully
considered life falls apart. The Coens have created a comical, lovable,
indelible victim of circumstance. The humor lies in Larry’s inability to stop
the onslaught. His undoing proceeds apace with our empathy for a good man
knocked flat.
Larry teaches
math from a room-size blackboard full of the equations he expects will provide
some certainty in his life. When Clive, an Asian son of a demanding father,
comes to him with an envelope full of cash as a bribe for changing an F to a
passing grade, Larry’s moral purity makes the choice easy. But when day is done,
Larry walks up the path of his ranch house into family chaos that is boiling
toward catastrophe.
His son Danny
(Aaron Wolff): “Dad, the antennae’s broken.” His daughter Sarah (Jessica
McManus): “Why does Uncle Arthur take so long in the bathroom? His wife Judith
(Sari Lennick): “Because he has to drain his sebaceous cyst.” Bathroom traffic
and broken appliances are hardly world class problems, but a few minutes later
Julia asks, “Have you thought about getting a lawyer?” She is in love with Sy
Ableman (Fred Melamed). After a few short scenes we understand that Larry is
surrounded by two selfish kids, a narcissistic wife and a brother with whom he
now must share the living room couch. Is Larry paying the price for a mistake
his ancestors made by letting a stranger into the house several generations
back?
After moving
to The Jolly Roger Motel, Larry visits a number of rabbis who advise him in
worthless platitudes. Judith wants a “ritual divorce” that will allow her to
marry within the faith, “F Troop” is still fuzzy from the broken antennae,
Arthur appears in a baby blue golf outfit (head to toe, baby blue). The Coens
unfurl disasters in stark overstatements that are laced with contradiction, and
their actors respond by becoming perfectly crafted horrible people who would
ruin anyone’s evening meal. Fred Melamed’s Sy Ableman is a study in
condescension that seems to have sprung from the Coens’ unbalanced minds.
Michael
Stuhlbarg’s Larry is a hapless fellow overwhelmed by ordinary life crises writ
large. “I tried to do everything right.” Yes, he did, and we wonder if Larry
will ever catch a break as the life cycle completes itself around his very
ordinary self. We laugh as life’s ironies consume him and groan at the absurdity
of the mediocrity that surrounds him. And we’re with him all the way.
Copyright (c) Illusion