Philadelphia Weekly

There’s an old saying: If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. But if you want to shut him up, just ask a question.


Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man grapples with massive cosmic mysteries on a deceptively mundane stage. It’s a film about the silence of God, seething with profound existential panic, viewed through a hilariously cracked prism of everyday minutiae.


Set in a Minneapolis suburb, circa 1967, the film stars Michael Stuhlbarg as Larry Gopnik, a college physics professor and human doormat whose entire life abruptly begins to crumble, proceeding from bad to worse with the kind of snowballing intensity and one-thing-after-another momentum that the Coens typically apply to their crime pictures.


Larry’s bratty son is always smoking weed when he should be prepping for his bar mitzvah, while his daughter sneaks twenty-dollar bills from his wallet, saving up for a nose job. His disturbingly odd brother Arthur (the great Richard Kind) sleeps on the couch, draining pus from a cyst on his neck while scribbling mathematical equations into a tattered notebook. The scary redneck next door is trying to bully his way over the property line, and he’s got a cryptic Korean student who seems to think he can bribe his way into a passing grade. The head of the tenure committee keeps hovering around his office, making vague mention of anonymous letters accusing Larry of moral turpitude.

But these are minor indignities compared to what follows. The first bombshell arrives when Mrs. Gopnick (Sari Lennick) announces that she’s leaving him for Sy Ableman, a community leader and all-around mensch played with grandiose, patronizing zest by Fred Melamed. Exiled to the “eminently habitable” Jolly Roger Motel (sharing a room with Arthur, no less), Larry collapses into a massive spiritual crisis.

Is this all just a test of faith? What is Hashem trying to tell him? Larry’s search for celestial explanation leads him up the hierarchy of local rabbis, in a series of agonizingly funny counseling sessions and rambling parables that remain stubbornly unresolved. Are Professor Gopnick’s epic misfortunes merely accidents of a chaotic universe, or are they all part of a deity’s master plan so complex and mysterious we mortals couldn’t even begin to understand it? And really, how much comfort can either answer provide when your wife is sleeping with Sy Ableman?

As always, the Coens are dismissed in some circles as snickering, nihilistic yuksters who get off tormenting their characters. Yes, the movie is indeed mercilessly funny, and it’s easy to see how the filmmakers’ consummate control of their craft might strike some as Kubrickian in its icy precision. But such a reading willfully ignores A Serious Man ’s open-ended, questioning structure.


The film begins with an ancient Yiddish fable about a wandering rabbi (Fyvush Finkel) who makes a deliberately ambiguous exit, and the door to divine intervention remains left open just a crack. There are two ways of seeing the film’s haunting final sequence. On one hand it could be just another shit-luck disaster in a sad life that’s full of them. But the timing of certain events suggests, ever so slightly, that our previously passive-to-a-fault Larry just might be being punished for a reason.


There’s a lot to chew on here, hefty themes visualized in that droll, classically out-sized Coen fashion. My favorite touch is a towering wall of blackboards, every inch filled with Larry’s frantic mathematical attempts to prove the Uncertainty Principle. “Even if you don’t understand this, you will be responsible for it on the midterm,” he notes, inadvertently summing up the character’s central philosophical conundrum.


Perhaps the only sage advice arrives early, from an imposing Korean gangster discussing an unrelated topic, instructing Larry to “accept the mystery.” At the end of the day, do any of us really have any other choice than to do just that? ■