A Serious Man

A Serious Man is a seriously funny and well-crafted film about a Jewish physics professor named Larry Gopnik whose life is falling apart for no obvious reason. His wife is leaving him for his best friend Sy Ableman (brilliantly played by Fred Melamed), his children neglecte him, a Korean student of his class tries to destroy him by leaving bribe money on his desk, his leech brother keeps running into trouble. Why? There is no reason and it only gets worse.

Larry wants to be taken as a serious and respectful man. He hasn't done wrong and that is the funny part. It just looks like God doesn't like him and decides to pull some pranks on him. We watch him searching for an answer to all these disasters going on in his life, and we laugh because we know there is no answer to it. He consults the Rabbis and none of them even takes him seriously. Larry lives in a world of numbers and equations. In his world even uncertainly can be understood with a mathematical equation, and the problem is in life there is no equation!

One of the funniest scenes of the movie is about a Jewish dentist finding a Hebrew phrase "Help me" engraved on the teeth of a gentile patient. The other scene involves Rabbi Marshack, rabbi of the highest rank, quoting a line from the Jefferson Airplane's song during a meeting with Larry's son Danny after his graduation ceremony. If you can find these scenes funny then this is your movie.

The things I love most from the Coen Brothers' consistent work are the clarity of the script and the inhuman and detached look of their characters. A Serious Man is a movie that you can enjoy because you are so detached from the characters that you can laugh at them from God's point of view. The perfection is up to the standard of Stanley Kubrick only the jokes are instantly accessible. The movie works like a Michael Heneke movie with a perfect punch line.

This is one of the finest movies from the Coen Brothers. It has all the trademarks of their best movies: the odd characters, wonderfully twisted jokes, perfectly thought out script, etc. Unlike Fargo or No Country for Old Man, A Serious Man is a pure comedy (if you can call it) that sets out to laugh at the stupidity of a man who thinks life is certain and manageable, whereas it is the opposite in the universe of a Coen Brothers' movie.

T.