As pertains to their work, Joel and Ethan Coen have developed something of a taste for cannibalism. Since No Country For Old Men essentially remade Raising Arizona through Cormac McCarthy's nihilistic prism (swap out a baby for a satchel full of cash, and work your way down from there), Burn After Reading inverted parts of the bloody, triple-crossing intrigue Fargo as a bloody Bush-era farce, and now A Serious Man is noshing on all the neuroses that seemed to fuel Barton Fink. Jewish male panic, professional irrelevance, sexual frustration, the struggles of the "life of the mind"... and that's just what I got from a little over a minute and a half. And which, I guess I should add, makes me all the more excited for the finished film.
I got past the Coens' repetition a long time ago -- they're too visually interesting to give up on, and I'd have had to abandon Quentin Tarantino, P.T. Anderson, Woody Allen and God knows whom else just to be consistent. At least the Serious Man trailer rewards that forbearance with something wholly new for the brothers: An almost experimental sense of rhythm and tone, set early on by the slamming of Michael Stuhlbarg's head against a chalkboard. As Prof. Larry Gopnik, that's just the beginning of Stuhlbarg's problems: His wife wants a divorce. His rabbi won't see him. He's the tense, contorted victim of a fender-bender. Standing over a hulking, unsympathetic woman's desk with his furrowed brow and his mouthful of regrets, he recalls the brothers' would-be screenwriter Barton Fink (John Turturro) despairing in 1991: "I gotta tell you -- the life of the mind? There's no road map for that territory."
Except the head-slamming percussion doesn't stop. And the rest of Gopnik's torment, circa 1967, settles into the beat around it, giving that suffering an almost mechanical function in the universe. By the time it ends, the Coens deliver the hammer blow that reduces the violence in No Country to cartoon-level thwacks. I won't spoil it (it's actually pretty funny under the circumstances), but imagine how you would react if God gave up on you.
That seems to be the larger issue behind A Serious Man, even if the brothers have to invoke an arbitrary scroll of their previous films to prove their worth in exploring it. Or maybe that's just the list of titles they'll admit to pulling from this time around. At least they're honest.
VERDICT: Sold!