Happiness For Blessing

You should know this up front: I'm a sucker for well-done Biblical allusion. A Serious Man takes the story of Job and applies it to a Jewish man in 1967, and the result is a wonderfully deep tale that questions the role of God in our affairs.

Nothing is going right in the life of Physics professor Larry Gopnik's life. He uses pithy illustrations about cats to teach complicated physics problems, then gets frustrated with a student when he focuses on the illustration rather than the math behind it. When the Junior Rabbi uses a similar hokey analogy to try to explain why everything in his life is going bad, his frustration goes. Larry doesn't "understand the math" behind why Hashem isn't bailing him out of his situation. At one point, he is standing on his roof trying to get better reception on his aerial antenna (brilliant symbolism), when he notices his neighbor sunbathing naked. Sound familiar? There are at least a dozen other allusions, and none of them seem forced or extraneous.

The most poignant is Larry's feeble quest to speak with Rabbi Marshak, the oldest and wisest of the clergymen. Like Job, he is turned away. In A Serious Man, the protagonist can see into Rabbi Marshak's office and tell that he isn't busy, but he is told there is no time for him to be seen. Eventually, Larry's son Danny is the one that is allowed to go in and speak to him, and the Rabbi is surprisingly not as serious as you might think. (The title is also spoken in the film about another character, but it works on many levels.) Marshak finds meaning in a Jefferson Airplane song, but whether or not Danny appreciates the Rabbi's attention or interpretation is in question.

I want to step aside and think about the son for a minute. I think that on one level, he is the key to the entire story. Larry is without a doubt the protagonist, but much of his final acceptance is based on his relationship with Danny. For that, I am very grateful for the way the Coen Brothers treated his part of the story. On the other hand, I absolutely hated the Bar Mitzvah scene. I read somewhere (can't find the link) that the idea of a kid being high at his own Bar Mitzvah was the original idea that the screenplay came from, but it seems like the script evolved enough that this scene came from a completely different movie. I thought it was wholly unnecessary, and so were Danny's friends that ride the bus with him. Maybe there's a way that they fit in that makes sense, but I've been thinking about this movie constantly for three days and it continues to bewilder me. In fact, I don't think I've been so internally conflicted about the quality of a movie before.

My conclusion (subject to change) is that A Serious Man is a brilliant movie that gets bogged down by a couple of extraneous plotlines, but it's still very much worth a viewing. The ending shot alone (a whirlwind, which some people claim whispers right before the credits roll) is worth the experience. 4.5/5