Are you serious?

A Serious Man, dir. Ethan & Joel Coen (2009)

The Coen brothers have been celebrated in the United States as filmmakers of reliability, intelligence, and, in a certain sense, esotericism. This means that their films are understood to be not only good, but also smart, and that their films are decidedly “not for everyone.” Liking films by the Coen brothers, furthermore, connotes that one is a person of good taste. This is how the very experience of going to see a Coen brothers picture should be understood: by its status as a kind of iterable event which is valued due to the status of the Coens as filmmakers who are unquestionably “good.” In this sense, the Coen brothers are representative of the pervasive decay of criticism, in that all arguments against them can be deflected with the use of sheer opinion: if you don’t like the Coens, their films are “not for you,” which in turn means that you are not a person of good taste and thus not reliable or intelligent. Presumably, you should be next door, watching The Box and eating popcorn.

A Serious Man, then, is the latest in the line of “good” films by the Coen brothers, of which the most well-known are Fargo and No Country For Old Men. Perhaps the most controversial is their previous film, Burn After Reading, and the best is The Big Lebowski. Too much time has passed, it seems, for anyone to challenge the cultural memory of Fargo; and The Big Lebowski is a truly great film. There are technical reasons why No Country For Old Men simply doesn’t work, and the failures of Burn After Reading are so blatant that it seems useless to indulge them here. A Serious Man–which presents itself a micro-chronicle of the Jewish experience in America during the second half of the twentieth century–is the first film to accurately contain, in its construction as a film, an accurate representation of the experience of going to see a film by the Coen brothers.

The film sets a morally gray and ominous tone by beginning with a parable about two peasants who (perhaps) mistake a man for a demon. In their confusion, the woman stabs the elderly visitor (demon?). As he leaves their home, the man claims that they are now cursed for their act. This parable could also be a case of narrative atavism, wherein the cursed couple are in fact the ancestors of Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), and thus responsible for the “bad luck” about which he whines throughout the film proper. Gopnik is a professor of physics in the Midwest. The year is 1967—before the storm, the Coen’s make painfully obvious, of 1968. He is beset by increasing burdens, what appears to be never ending bad luck: his wife leaves him for a man curiously reminiscent of Tim Robbins’ character in High Fidelity, his kids don’t give a shit, he has an uncomfortably macho-neighbor (shades of American Beauty, here), he’s stressed about his ongoing tenure review, he has a really annoying brother. He’s kicked out of his house and has to move into a motel called the Jolly Roger. Life is tough, and Larry knows it: when he’s not saying “why me” out-loud he’s just bursting into tears.

The Coens don’t seem to care about anything other than whether or not something can be laughed at—which, when you think about it the way they do, means that anything is good for a laugh. In this light, couldn’t the film itself be a parody of that which it presents, rendering it a successful comedy and ensuring that, on the contrary, the Coen’s know how unbearable Larry is and—don’t you see?—that’s the joke! Fine, fine, this could be true. But isn’t such a maneuver, which is effectively a parody themselves as cliché, unfavorable in and of itself? The cynicism of such a film—through what would be so subtle a parody as to make parody itself inseparable from realism?—would mean that the Coens are only interested in the cliché of the whiney Jew, thus making the film itself fundamentally uninteresting. Even in this defense of the film, it would be hard to find anything to celebrate.

Yet the film, constructed from Larry’s point of view, creates a narrative that constantly wonders: why is everyone else so crazy, so intent on doing me harm, when I’m so normal? Can’t these crazies see what’s really going on? It is in this sense that Larry’s experience becomes analogous to the viewer’s: what’s so wrong with you that you don’t see what’s right—that this is a great film? For the very act of “seeing a Coen brothers film” has, embedded within it, a statement against all those who don’t go see Coen brothers films. It’s an unbearably smug situation to find yourself in—and an unbearable way to construct a film.