In Theaters: A Serious Man

I'm going to take the advice of Rashi, the medieval French Rabbi whose epigram opens A Serious Man, and receive with simplicity everything that happens to me -- which in this case is the Coen brothers' latest exercise in gleeful moral nihilism. Simply put, it's a slog, mostly; expertly crafted and yet difficult to watch, it features a sympathetic central performance by a wonderful actor, and a host of provocatively repellent cut-outs of Jews, Koreans, and red-faced "goyim." But mostly Jews. Job-like trials are suffered by this main character, and he tries to figure out why bad things keep happening while the viewer tries to figure out why, as in, why did I come here. Then certain things resolve just as certain other, more serious things unfurl to their full, terrifying extension on the horizon. It all feels mean and hard and then, in the final moment, mean and hard and transcendent and right.

That's always the gamble with the cinema of discomfort: its proprietors hope that enough viewers will click into the proper register of perverse gratification, and leave the theater with the glassy-eyed euphoria that a good flogging gifts a believer. I know I had it walking out of Dogville; that was for my own good, I thought, no doubt. But I'm not so certain about A Serious Man, a time capsule portrait of Midwestern Jewish identity seething with a mordant, righteous anger that never quite connects. From the opening sequence, a fable set in an old timey, European shtetl involving the appearance of what may or may not be a ghost, or dybbuk, the Coens' agenda seems as clear as the words hissed by Von Trier's self-immolating little fox in Antichrist: Chaos reigns. Yeah, okay, but then what? That question can only be posed by a viewer who has been left to her own devices -- allowed to mark, rather than revel in, her enervation.

It's also the question Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) asks the second Rabbi he consults when his myriad problems (his wife is leaving him, his brother is falling apart, his tenure as a physics professor may be in jeopardy, he's being bribed by a student) are treated with an inscrutable story about a goy who is discovered to have the Hebrew characters for "help me/save me" engraved on the inside of his lower incisors. The Rabbi's response is incredulous: why would you want to know? And what happened to the goy? "The goy?" he says. "Who cares!" Cue a big, uncomfortable laugh release. ("That always brings the house down," Joel Coen said in a recent interview. "It's a classic line," Ethan added.) You get the feeling the Coens share the Rabbi's incredulity around the question of what happens next: the destination is always the same, and so, pretty much, is the journey. More and more with their films an unpleasant viewing experience seems to be not only the intention but the point.

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