A Serious Man, U.S./UK/France 2009. Directed and written by Joel and Ethan Coen.
Metropol Phantom Theater, Row 1, Seat 3. Original version.
(This post also appears at my Letterboxd account.)
Beware: this review contains spoilers.
According to the end credits of Joel & Ethan Coen’s 2009 A Serious Man, “No Jews were harmed in the making of this film.” Which fits in nicely with both the movie’s existential dread and the Coens’ signature style of humor that resides somewhere between the dark and the absurd. Like in other Coen movies, the protagonist lives in a cruel world without being aware of it, always presuming good faith where there is none, and the suffering piles up because of it. (Case in point: not only does he wind up paying for his overbearing and bizarrely patronizing friend’s funeral to whom he just lost his wife and, absurdly, his home; that friend also turns out—in a casual remark during the funeral—to have been the one who wrote the anonymous letters to the committee berating him as unfit for tenure.)
A lot has been written about how the movie is a retelling of the Book of Job, and that’s solidly off the mark. Similarities and allusions abound, of course, and they’re certainly intended. However, that text necessarily looms large as it is inextricably intertwined with the Jewish experience across history. (And for all the exquisitely clueless Christian reviews that compare the movie unfavorably to that book, let me quote from one of my favorite comedy routines by Lewis Black: “And their interpretations—I have to tell you—are usually wrong. It’s not their fault, it’s just that it’s not their book. You never see a rabbi on TV interpreting the New Testament, do you?”)
The protagonist isn’t punished despite being righteous, i.e, having done everything “right.” He can’t understand why suddenly all the wheels fall off—as brilliantly foreshadowed in the Yiddish vignette—not because he did nothing wrong but because he didn’t do anything at all. (He hasn’t even published any papers he could hand in to the tenure committee, and even this aspect of “I didn’t do anything” does he take, hilariously, as a point in his favor.) However, while he keeps being punished by events for this double whammy of presupposing good faith and not doing anything, the events themselves happen for no reason in the first place. They’re all, in physics and philosophy parlance, brute facts behind which there are no more fundamental facts that could explain them. The motif of uncertainty is heavily involved, and as to uncertainty, Ebert’s review gets it wrong again: the protagonist’s mathematical proofs do not “approach certainty” but prove there’s no such thing, and it’s not merely because our knowledge is incomplete but because there isn’t anything to know. It’s just what it is.
Uncertainty and the uncertainty principle are major motifs embedded in the overarching theme of unknowability. Is the reb in the vignette a dybbuk or not? Will all these layers of deliberate cliffhangers the movie ends on be solved? Through the lens of the theme, the point of stories is not resolution or revelation, nor is any of that important. The point of the story is the story. When the “second rabbi” tells a mystery story that purportedly contains the advice the protagonist seeks, and the protagonist then asks whether that mystery’s ever been solved, the rabbi exasperatedly exclaims “Who cares!”
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