In Theaters: A Serious Man

Most of the characters here are grotesques, so much so that it is impossible to see past their grotesquerie, as if that too were the point. The Coens seem to revel in human in muck, from weeping cysts to hairy-eared men, fat, horking women, horny, weathered neighbor-ladies, and a fish-faced virago for a wife. Larry is cuckolded by Sy Ableman (the apparent standard of serious manhood, played by Fred Melamed), a purring rationalist who wants to cradle Larry's face while he nails him to the wall. At the office his superior, a damp academic with crabbed posture and bunchy suits, keeps stopping by to make passive-aggressive confidences and say things like, "See you in the staff caf!" The surface period details are all there (we are in 1967 in an unidentified Midwestern town), and yet something feels grotesque about them as well -- as though capturing the era merely requires the right car and glasses, and repeated, almost bludgeoning references to Jefferson Airplane and F-Troop.

While trying to engage with a militant Korean student who wants to buy himself out of a failing grade, Larry explains the idea of the stories he uses in class to help his students understand the extremely complex math behind them. Sure, we can all grasp big picture concepts intuitively, he says, the skill is in actually delineating the working parts, breaking them out into equations in black and white. But by focusing on the nuts and bolts their central tenet -- chaos reigns -- so relentlessly, the Coens come dangerously close to making films that are not only frequently unbearably bleak but that have lost the bigger picture, the story.

Too often they go for the indulgent laugh at the expense of the characters, and our connections to them. Is this how Larry sees the world? Full of hopeless dupes, amoral ciphers, and unlovable loved ones with only a single, pointlessly moral sensibility at its center? Or is this how the Coens see it? And if so what about those final moments, when an act of God seems imminent, and all of His (i.e. the Coens') wretches suddenly leap from caricature into the third dimension? What happens next? What does it all mean? Nothing. Everything. Get it?

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