"A Serious Man" (my 0-10 rating: 9)
Genre: Subtle Comedy-drama with sophisticated wit and humor undertone
Directors: Ethan & Joel Coen
Writers: Ethan & Joel Coen
Cast: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick,
Aaron Wolff
Time: 1 hr., 45 min.
Rating: R (vulgarity, some sexuality/nudity, brief violence)

"Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble." (from the Book of Job: 14:1)
"Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind ..." (from the Book of Job: 38:1).

Inspired by the Book of Job in the Bible comes the Coen Brothers' daringly intelligent 1967-set movie of high-level subtlety and rarefied humor as only they can do it. The broad range of critical ratings of "A Serious Man" was no doubt expected by them. Their major mistake, in terms of audience communication, was in failing to use those quotes as captions at beginning and end.

For the Job quote would have suggested an explanation to the ending, in which God appears as a tornado, implying that in the world of disorder, God has more to do than simply care for the trivial troubles of humanity. Take responsibility for thine own self, appears to be the divine message.

Not for the short attention span, not for the impatient. In fact it's not for any but a limited audience who can readily abide a sense of the tragi-comedy in human travail, and even cruelty. Rating the film for its entertainment value is quite the challenge because, while it's a super-sophisticated movie, its indifference to lowering its abstraction level to a reasonably accessible level sometimes feels like almost a death wish.

Steeped in American-Jewish culture, part old-world, part-new, the tale is told of a plain but intellectual guy who is so bold, or so futile, as to be looking for the meaning of life and, of all things, what God wants of him. But first the film starts with an old Jewish folk tale about a Polish husband and wife who are brought to expel a wise and just old man, who may be a ghost, from their humble abode.

Now it's 1967, when under-30s were in a fury over the failures of those who had raised them, and 30-somethings were just confused. Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a plain, honest man, married with children. He is a physics professor at a tranquil Midwestern University.

Troubles are piling up. First, his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) announces that she's leaving him. Why? Oy, you should only ask. She's fallen for his unctuous, pompous acquaintance, widower Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed). Compared to the ineffective, feebly spirited Larry, Sy, she says, is a more substantial man -- a serious man. She tells Larry to get out and go live in a motel.

More? Sure. There's Larry's unemployable brother Arthur (Richard Kind) sleeping as usual on the couch. Son Danny is a delinquent of sorts at Hebrew school. Daughter Sarah is purloining cash from his wallet -- saving up for a nose job.

And at work? Well, there's an anonymous letter-writer who appears to be out to torpedo Larry's upcoming tenure at the university. Then there's the apparent bribe attempt by a student looking for a higher grade. He says he'll sue Larry for defamation. And Larry has a gun-freak neighbor who can be very menacing. Could there be anything worse? How about the lovely next door neighbor who sunbathes nude? And, of course, some car accidents. Or the man from Columbia Record Club who keeps calling to inquire as to when to expect payment for five monthly records sent to Larry by a send-an-automatic-record contract entered by Larry's son.

So Larry is off to find advice by rabbis. How to become a "mensch" (non-translatable, but, roughly, a serious man). And so many, many more questions.

Larry would desperately like to know what God wants of him. Wandering around in deadpan, he looks for signs. Surely they must be there. But all he finds is absurdity, nonsense and ambiguous rabbis. So is there no God? Meantime, his son's Bar Mitzvah is upcoming. And the X-rays are due from Larry's car accident. The doctor calls and says, "You better come on in."

The appearance of the tornado at the end, which is obviously God, is evidently the answer to Larry's multitude of questions, but one must go to Job for the answers. Perhaps Larry should have been presented with the ancient Zen Buddhist preachment, "There are no questions."

The film is open to complaint that the Coen's are reaching too far beyond most audiences' willingness to interpret what they've seen. I'll hold, however, that if any given level or class of educated and intelligent people are entertained by a product of the arts, then it must be rated for that particular group. With that in mind, "A Serious Man" is an exceptional work, accomplishing every minute encounter between its players with fastidious attention. One is brought to not merely watch an exchange, but to study it. Do that and you'll find an intrinsic tension leading to suspense.

Watch, for instance, when Larry, standing in his physics class before a two-story high blackboard saturated with arcane mathematical equations and formulae, revels in the certainty and preciseness of math, but then explains that sometimes an equation will conclude with a contradiction.

Does one have to be Jewish to appreciate the movie? No, but it sure doesn't hurt. The guilt, the sense of persecution, the distraught pleadings for an answer from God, is pretty basic and ancient stuff. But so is the fierce dedication of the Jewish passion for education, especially in this otherwise unruly Bar Mitzvah boy's discipline to the Torah (the first five books of the Bible).

For the non-Jewish Coen Brothers buff, their weird, beyond-offbeat references and exacting focus upon hidden meanings in ordinary conversation are all there. For us, there is pain, but it's a kind of cringing pain, not just for Larry, but for yourself over why you find this funny. It can be boisterously chuckle-worthy. But unquestionably, the Coens have pressed the envelope beyond its tearing point and laid out their film on a precariously high plateau of intellectual filmmaking.



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