A Serious Man. (15.)
Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen.
Starring Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Sari Lennick, Fred Melamed, Aaron Wolff, Adam Arkin. 106 mins.
If you stay till the end of the credits - and there’s absolutely no reason why you should, but if you do - you will read a line that announces that No Jews Were Harmed In The Making Of This Film. It is a nice little joke, though nothing special in a film packed with rather better, rather bigger jokes. I mention it only to introduce the fact that this, their 14th feature, is the first time Coen Brothers have really addressed Jewishness.
I also mention it because it patently isn’t true; their lead character science lecturer Larry Gopnik (Stuhlbarg) has had to endure considerable harm.
The music (specifically Jefferson Aeroplane) tells us that it is the late sixties but everything else screams suffocating fifties suburbia. Gopnik is less a man, more a white flag on legs. An avalanche of misfortunes – a wife who wants to leave him, a student who wants to bribe him and children who just want him to go up on the roof and fix the aerial – threaten his comfortable existence in the heart of the Jewish community and his instinct each time is to retreat from conflict.
Most have seen The Old Testament, specifically the story of Job, as the main reference point but I saw it as a parody of the Great American Novel, a lost Bellow or Updike perhaps. It is sharp and cruelly funny as it addresses the conflict between science and religion to explain existence.
It is weighty and fulfilling like really top class literature in a way cinema rarely is. Its conceits and metaphors would all surely work just as well on the page but of course if it was taken from a book it just wouldn’t work as well. (For example, Revolutionary Road is a marvellous movie but even if you didn’t know it was adapted from a piece of literature you’d sense it, know that you were getting a pinched version.)
It is a film to get lost in and as impressive as anything the Coens have produced in a remarkable career. It is perhaps one of their more private efforts, even less inclined to come out and play with a wider audiences than their usual films but even from filmmakers where excellence comes as standard, this is an incredibly rich and full piece of filmmaking.
A Serious Man. (15.)
Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen.
Starring Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Sari Lennick, Fred Melamed, Aaron Wolff, Adam Arkin. 106 mins.
If you stay till the end of the credits - and there’s absolutely no reason why you should, but if you do - you will read a line that announces that No Jews Were Harmed In The Making Of This Film. It is a nice little joke, though nothing special in a film packed with rather better, rather bigger jokes. I mention it only to introduce the fact that this, their 14th feature, is the first time Coen Brothers have really addressed Jewishness.
I also mention it because it patently isn’t true; their lead character science lecturer Larry Gopnik (Stuhlbarg) has had to endure considerable harm.
The music (specifically Jefferson Aeroplane) tells us that it is the late sixties but everything else screams suffocating fifties suburbia. Gopnik is less a man, more a white flag on legs. An avalanche of misfortunes – a wife who wants to leave him, a student who wants to bribe him and children who just want him to go up on the roof and fix the aerial – threaten his comfortable existence in the heart of the Jewish community and his instinct each time is to retreat from conflict.
Most have seen The Old Testament, specifically the story of Job, as the main reference point but I saw it as a parody of the Great American Novel, a lost Bellow or Updike perhaps. It is sharp and cruelly funny as it addresses the conflict between science and religion to explain existence.
It is weighty and fulfilling like really top class literature in a way cinema rarely is. Its conceits and metaphors would all surely work just as well on the page but of course if it was taken from a book it just wouldn’t work as well. (For example, Revolutionary Road is a marvellous movie but even if you didn’t know it was adapted from a piece of literature you’d sense it, know that you were getting a pinched version.)
It is a film to get lost in and as impressive as anything the Coens have produced in a remarkable career. It is perhaps one of their more private efforts, even less inclined to come out and play with a wider audiences than their usual films but even from filmmakers where excellence comes as standard, this is an incredibly rich and full piece of filmmaking.
