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Film Reviews

A SERIOUS MAN

By • Oct 22nd, 2009 •

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Every character is ugly and repulsive except the shiksa next door. What does this say about the Coen Brothers?

You will leave A SERIOUS MAN and think: “The Coen Brothers are self-hating Jews.” Why is every character ugly and repulsive except the naked shiksa next door?

I’m not only confused, I’m troubled.

The movie opens with a mini-horror tale about a Jewish peasant who is helped by an old man. He invites the man to his home. As soon as he tells his wife, she says they are now cursed. The man died a few years ago, so now a dybbuk (in Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is a malicious possessing spirit, believed to be the dislocated soul of a dead person) is coming for soup! Confronting their guest, the wife promptly stabs the man (or dybbuk) in the chest.

Never go to 1967. It was ugly. In a Jewish neighborhood in the Midwest, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a college mathematics professor on the verge of tenure with a wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), who is having an “affair of the heart” with repulsive friend Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed); a son, Danny (Aaron Wolff), who is preparing for his bar mitzvah while stoned on pot; and a shrieking daughter, Sarah (Jessica McManus), who is stealing money from him for a nose job.

As if this sadistic look at middle-class Jewish life has any philosophical context, Larry struggles to explain the famous thought experiment, the classic Schrödinger’s cat*, to his class. So, let’s be clear: Larry knows nothing.

Staying with the Stuhlbargs is Larry’s loser of a brother Arthur (Richard Kind), who has a repulsive disease he must tend to every few hours by extracting tons of pus from a cyst on his neck. He is staying on their couch. He has other anti-social, humiliating problems as well.

When Judith and Sy announce they are planning to get married in the faith, they insist Larry move to a nearby motel with Arthur. Larry goes to a series of rabbis who are clueless and offer absolutely no spiritual advice or comfort. Faced with mounting legal bills, Larry’s tenure is jeopardized by harassing letters to the college’s committee. A Korean exchange student aggressively refuses to accept his failing grade from Larry. He offers Larry a bribe.

I was appalled by the cruel, cartoon depiction of Jews!

So now I know where the Coen Brothers came up with Anton Chigurh’s hairdo. Their parents made them get that haircut.

Every person in Larry’s world – his Jewish community – is vile. Every stereotype is lovingly represented: Spitting Jews, Jews without teeth, obese Jewish women with male voices, ancient rabbis who do not care about their people – this shocking portrayal of Jewish people goes on and on.

The entire story is dressed with so much vulgarity that whatever “message” the Coen Brothers are saying is buried beneath a pile of anti-Semitic feces. The Coens even disrespect Jewish customs and religion. Danny goes to his bar mitzvah stoned. The rabbis have absolutely no interest in helping Larry save his marriage. There is no community support.

Larry lives in a vicious, loathsome, ugly world.

How in the world did both Coen brothers and their entire production staff and crew agree to this mean-spirited depiction of Jewish life and morality?

* Schrödinger’s Cat: A cat, along with a flask containing a poison, is placed in a sealed box shielded against environmentally induced quantum decoherence. If an internal Geiger counter detects radiation, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when we look in the box, we see the cat either alive or dead, not a mixture of alive and dead.

Victoria Alexander lives in Las Vegas, Nevada and answers every email. You can contact Victoria directly at masauu@aol.com.

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