A Serious Movie Fan

Ok, I was a bit busy writing my NSF proposal so I decided to wait a week to see the new Coen Brothers movie, A Serious Man. But it turns out that this movie by the guys who made Raising Arizona, Fargo and many others, including No Country for Old Men which won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay, played for exactly one week in Baton Rouge, A.K.A. the whirlpool of despair. Ok, no worries, I thought. I can still see it in New Orleans. although this is somewhat harder than it used to be since my favorite Indie theatre, Canal Place, is now closed. It was still playing at the AMC Elmwood Palace 20, but when I checked the listings, I noticed that Thursday was its last day!  So that's why I drove 75 miles Thursday night to see a movie that wasn't called New Moon. I saw the second last show in all of Louisiana. Now the closest theatre playing A Serious Man is in Houston.

A Serious Man tells the story of a very serious man, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), seen above, who is a physics professor in Minneapolis, MN. At the start of the movie, all is seems well for Larry and his family, but very quickly things start to fall apart. First, the good news. Larry is about to get tenure at the university and his son is about to have his Bar Mitzvah. Now the bad news, Larry's wife (Sari Lennick), seen below, announces she is leaving him for another man (Fred Melamed), his melancholy, gambling, whoring brother is arrested, a foreign student tries to bribe Larry to get a passing grade, and someone is sending nasty anonymous letters to the tenure committee. And to top it off Larry's son (Aaron Wolff) is always complaining that he can't get good reception on the TV when he is watching F Troop. You may think that I am spoiling this movie for you but this is just what we find out in the first half hour of A Serious Man. There is much worse to come.

This movie is all about the Undertoad, that strong feeling of foreboding one gets from time to time. To set the tone, the movie starts with a vignette somewhere sometime in eastern Europe that tells a folk tale about a family who is visited by a Dybbuk. A Serious Man is a very Jewish movie. It's a Woody Allen movie with a Coen Brothers spin. There are lots of quirky Jewish characters and a lot of angst. Larry's lawyer (Adam Arkin), seen below, is eventually handling Larry's divorce, his brother's arrest, and Larry's dispute with his strange cranky neighbor. But it's not all gloom and doom. There is some hilarity provided by Larry's son and his transistor radio. The cast other than Adam Arkin (Life, The West Wing) is mostly unknowns. Michael Stuhlbarg who plays Larry does a really great job. Other standouts are Richard Kind who plays Larry's depressed brother and Aaron Wolff who plays Larry's son.

A Serious Man is a bit like Fargo or No Country for Old Men. In these movies, the Coen Brothers follow the John Irving playbook by subjecting some fairly normal people to more and more abnormal events until something explodes. I live with Undertoad every day, so I quite enjoyed this movie. At first, it seems almost boring in its banality, but it sucks you in and soon you get caught up in the desperation of Larry's life and hope that he can at least improve the reception of F Troop. But you also know that isn't going to happen because this is the Coen brothers not Woody Allen. The last scene is amazing. You'll have to go see the movie to see why. As Larry tells his physics class as he is describing the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, you can't tell if Schroedinger's cat is dead until you look in the box.