The Coen Brothers’ latest picture, A Serious Man is a movie so steeped in a personal and religious history that it can be a little off putting. It follows Physics professor Larry Gopnik as he encounters some trials in his life: his wife wants to leave him and marry an old friend, Sy; his son can’t get proper reception on the tube for F-Troop, one of his students appears to be blackmailing him.
An excellent write up of it by Todd Alcott begins by questioning the role of Gopnik – apparently many people find him to be a little too passive, in that a lot of uncontrollable things happen around him as he struggles to make sense of it and react (his most decisive reaction is a dream, it turns out). But interestingly , Alcott’s main point is that the protagonist isn’t so much Gopnik as it is God Himself, and the question of agency becomes a lot more difficult to grab onto all of a sudden. There’s no doubt among any of the characters whether or not God exists, but the notion that Joel and Ethan Coen, as the writers, believe he’s there is less clear (and, ultimately, doesn’t matter).
But Gopnik and friends struggle with this question of meaning – is his brother Arthur truly indecent, reveling at the North Dakota (soliciting sodomy, they say), or was he just playing cards? They wouldn’t even let him play, according to Arthur. So he gets caught, and decides that being brought home to a family would look better, rather than being brought back to the hotel Larry and Arthur are holed up in, but look better to who? The family, or to God? The family would judge Arthur harshly, but does God forgive because he’s part of a family? (The notion that Arthur, a brilliant something or other — did he develop an invention, a mathematic formula? — could pull a fast one over on God by being brought ‘home’ by the police is hilarious, particularly given the brutal embarrassment he’s going to suffer at the hands of his relatives.)
The boy’s search for a good F-Troop signal could very easily be mapped to the quest for God (and who does Larry see from the rooftop?), and this is ultimately why Larry goes to the Rabbis who proxy as his faith’s faltering aerial (and often it isn’t so clear, as in the case of the goy’s teeth).
But even though a lot of A Serious Man felt unknowable to me, it’s an incredible film with a lot simmering under the surface. And the search for God here can just as easily be a search for meaning and morality in a secular life. The last few sequences of the film are a little baffling, to the degree which Mother Nature begins to insert herself into the frame. We have no way of knowing what exactly the prognosis of Larry’s final conversation is, or what exactly is riding on the wind, but it does firmly suggest that something is coming, and it isn’t very good.
