No Country for Old Country

Jews making fun of Jews, with affection and without, have provided
some of the most savagely funny American art of the past 50 years. From
Saul Bellow to Philip Roth, from WoodyAllen to Larry David, the
tradition of mockery from within has been a reliable source of comedy
and controversy alike, as well as a fascinating inquiry into the
ongoing conflict between Jewish tradition and assimilation.

A Serious Man, the new film by Joel and Ethan Coen, is a bold
and unexpected entry into this tradition of Jewish mischief, one based
as much in metaphysics as in farce. It’s no surprise that the authors
of The Big Lebowski, Raising Arizona, Fargo, and
Barton Fink should make a movie this funny—even their bad
movies are funny (not counting The Ladykillers). But A
Serious Man plumbs depths even major Coen devotees might not have
imagined were there. It’s not a departure, exactly—except in the
way all their films are departures. It’s an expansion, a magnification,
a breakthrough. Yes, like all their movies, it’s kind of a big joke,
but a joke with the darkest punch line ever. The Coen brothers, who for
25 years have been called cold formalists with more interest in
Steadicams and storyboards than in human characters, have made a movie
about the twilight of the Jewish soul.

One of the pleasures and frustrations of watching a Coens
movie—much like watching Claire Denis or reading Joan
Didion—is trying to figure out what exactly is really going on while all that talent whizzes by. Their prodigious stylishness
masks their true identity as master subtextualists. However
recognizable a given film’s genre constraints might be, the real story
is almost always beneath the story. A Serious Man plays out as a
sort of almost-modern-day Jewish folktale about a suburban
schlimazel named Larry Gopnik whose life is on the verge of
crumbling. A physics professor who might not get tenured (and who may
or may not be getting bribed by a flunking student), a husband whose
wife wants a divorce so she can remarry immediately (her oily lover
wants everyone to be friends), a father whose totally assimilated kids
are only interested in F Troop and nose jobs (they also steal
his money to buy pot and join the Columbia Record Club), and a brother
to a true loser (he’s always in the bathroom draining his sebaceous
cyst or getting arrested for gambling and sodomy)—Larry is beset
by evidence that his dream of being a good guy with a good life is not
coming true. He turns first to mathematics and then to his faith for
solace, seeking the counsel of three rabbis whose advice ranges from
banal (“Things aren’t so bad: Look at the parking lot, Larry!”) to
inscrutable (“Helping others: couldn’t hurt!”). But the more desperate
he gets, the less comfort he finds in his old reliable rituals. Then,
just when everything looks grimmest, those very rituals restore
order—just before everything really unravels.

All this would feel like a traditional Coen brothers dark comedy if
not for certain formal and tonal elements hinting at something more
numinous in the film’s design. It opens with a fable set in the old
country in which a young couple is visited by a man the wife insists is
a dybbuk (a body inhabited by an evil spirit turned away from
hell). As the scene shifts to 1967, you keep expecting to return to
this eerie, unresolved prologue, until its unresolvedness emerges as
its clear purpose. Then there’s 1967 itself—not exactly an
insignificant year for the history of America or for modern Judaism,
and not exactly the kind of detail the Coens would choose at random.
Though no mention is made of the state of Israel or the Six-Day War
(always subtext), Larry’s plight has everything to do with the changing
nature of Jewishness and the incompatibility of the old ways with his
modern problems—not to mention with gentile America, in the shape
of his deer-hunting, catch-playing, lawn-mowing neighbor who clearly
hates him. When the neighbor is around, the film almost feels like a
Jewish response to American Beauty. Instead of watching Kevin
Spacey play midlife crisis, you see an actor no one’s heard of (Michael
Stuhlbarg, totally brilliant) play Job. But in Coenworld, Job gets to
watch everything he’s ever believed become obsolete, then pay for his
rival’s funeral. Funny.

It doesn’t take a rabbi to see that A Serious Man is about
the end of faith—not God faith as much as faith in the
formalities of faith as a repository for life’s unanswerable questions.
Larry’s doubts signal massive turmoil ahead, but they also feel like a
cause for hope. Almost. Given all the binary talk we’ve been hearing
about faith and reason for the past several years, the scope of the
Coens’ epistemological inquiry is startling. And bleak. And hilarious.
And very Jewish.