At the conclusion of their new movie, “A Serious Man,” the Coen brothers pull off a neat little joke. The picture is devoted to the travails of an unhappy Midwestern Jewish family—a real menagerie—in the sixties, and, in the end titles, the Coens have inserted, after the names of hardworking laboratories, the words “No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture.” Very good; first rate, in fact. But I’m not sure it’s true. I know of at least two Jews who were harmed—Ethan and Joel Coen. “A Serious Man,” like “Burn After Reading,” is in their bleak, black, belittling mode, and it’s hell to sit through. The movie is a deadpan farce with a schlemiel Job as a hero—Professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physicist at a local university, whose life, in 1967, is falling apart. Gopnik’s wife (Sari Lennick) is leaving him for a sanctimonious bastard (Fred Melamed) who covers his aggressions against Larry with limp-pawed caresses and offers of “understanding.” Larry’s kids are thieving brats, and his hapless, sick, whining brother (Richard Kind) camps on the living-room couch and refuses to look for work. There’s more, much more, a series of mishaps, sordid betrayals, and weird coincidences, but Larry, a sweet guy and “a serious man”—upright, a good teacher, a father—won’t hit back. Occasionally, his eyebrows fluttering like street signs in a hurricane, he stands up for himself, but he won’t take a shot at anyone, or try to control anyone, verbally or any other way. He won’t even sleep with the dragon-eyed but sexy and highly available woman next door who sunbathes naked.
The Coens begin mysteriously, with what feels like a Yiddish folktale. Long ago, in a shtetl somewhere in Eastern Europe, an elderly man, supposedly dead, wanders into the house of a married couple. The wife is sure that he’s a dybbuk—a spirit possessing a human’s body—and she sticks a knife in his chest. The troubles surrounding Larry Gopnik in suburban Minnesota many generations later can only be seen as the revenge of “Hashem”—the word that Conservative Jews in this Midwestern community use to name God. (If that Old Country dybbuk was not God himself, he must have been in God’s employ.) One model for the tale is obvious: acting on his wager with Satan, God drives Job to despair. Yet Job, risking his life, questions his tormentor, and Larry does not. The Coens created him that way; they explicitly celebrate “simplicity” and resignation. But a schlep and a weeper is a hero impossible to stay interested in.
The Coens themselves grew up in a suburban area outside Minneapolis. Like Larry’s pot-smoking son, Danny (Aaron Wolff), they were kids in the sixties, when rock and roll and drugs kicked holes in the conformist patterns of American middle-class life. They may be remembering that repressive time and its breakup—assuaging old hurts, settling old scores. Bored to death as a Hebrew teacher drones on, Danny, transistor radio plugged into his ear, listens to Grace Slick raising the roof in “Somebody to Love,” which certainly feels like a primal memory of entrapment and liberation. That song, plus dope and “F Troop” on TV, is all that keeps Danny going.
He and his family live on a featureless, sun-bleached suburban street where each house is fronted by a boxy patch of grass. It’s the suburban nightmare that keeps showing up in ambitious American movies as the banality of evil itself. The low ceilings, the schlocky décor are meant to be of a piece with the endless family bickering and emotional blackmail—satirically enhanced signs of mediocre, soul-punishing middle-class taste, Jewish division. As always, the Coens shape their visual scheme into mocking juxtapositions: sudden, startling shifts of perspective; intrusive closeups of ears and mouths; scenes that end abruptly, with cuts arriving like a guillotine’s blade. The brilliant cinematographer Roger Deakins uses super-hard focus and solid colors, and when Larry, perched on his roof, tries to straighten out the TV aerial, he looks like a forlorn figure in a nineties hyperrealist painting. Instead of paintings meant to look like photographs, the Coens give us photographs that look like paintings, and there’s a touch of the uncanny in the hard-edged look, as if Hashem had isolated and withered Larry with his gaze. As a piece of moviemaking craft, “A Serious Man” is fascinating; in every other way, it’s intolerable.
What happens in Minnesota has none of the warmth and expansiveness of a folktale, either traditional or modern. (Isaac Bashevis Singer would have been disgusted by the hero’s backing away from the babe next door.) The Coens’ humor is distant, dry, and shrivelling, and they make the people in “A Serious Man” so drably unappealing that you begin to wonder what kind of disgust the brothers are working off. Whatever indignities the Coens suffered as teens, they have hardly been hampered by those memories as adults. Philip Roth’s collection of stories “Goodbye, Columbus,” which tore into the timidity and prohibitions of middle-class American Jewish life, came out in 1959, when Ethan Coen was two and Joel five. The Coens’ laughter is not exactly fresh. Dozens of popular comics in the past half century have worked in the same satiric vein.
Larry applies to a series of local rabbis for help, and the rabbis, vain of their wisdom, either miss the point of his troubles or tell elaborate parables that illuminate nothing; they have no idea why Hashem is pursuing this man. And who is Hashem, anyway? I suppose one might say that all filmmakers, distributing rewards and punishments, come close to playing God. Surely the arbitrary and ruthless Coens are the only deity in sight. Larry Gopnik may teach the uncertainty principle in his class, but his own fate is sealed in advance, and we’re not surprised when, at the end, the apocalypse arrives in a dark whirl. Judging from “A Serious Man,” one can only say, without blasphemy, that the cinematic Hashem is a malevolent son of a bitch.
There’s a good documentary kicking around at the moment that connects the arrogant behavior of bankers in New York to the loss of homes and the destruction of neighborhoods during the economic meltdown—Andrew and Leslie Cockburn’s “American Casino.” Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” is something else—not a good movie or a coherent exposition of the meltdown but an emotional attack on capitalism as a system, an attempt, literally, to de-moralize capitalism. Moore wants to end the notion that capitalism is good—benevolent, creative-destructive, the Lord’s work, or anything else positive that has ever been claimed for it. Capitalism, in this rendering, lays waste to everything; it’s a power structure that allows the rich to steal from the poor. There is much talk of “the rich” and their bad behavior. Some of the taunts may be justified, but, improbably, Moore has rich people and their bought-and-paid-for agents in Congress consciously planning every turn in the economy as a series of heists (Alan Greenspan’s recommending home-equity loans was the beginning of a scheme, it turns out, to get people “out of their houses”). If that’s the case, Moore might have offered some explanation of how “the rich,” as well as millions of others, lost thirty per cent or more of their equity in the stock-market collapse of 2008. Undeterred, he ridicules sordid practices—for instance, a privately run juvenile detention center where kids committing minor offenses are put away for months, increasing profitability. He uses old films, like Zeffirelli’s “Jesus of Nazareth,” for sarcastic fun: Jesus, dubbed, recommends not care for the poor but deregulating the banking industry as the way to salvation.
“Capitalism” gathers emotional force when Moore moves close to the victims.He uses a home video shot inside a foreclosed house that squatters have refused to leave; the police approach in force and then bash through the kitchen door—a scary moment. He joins the defiant workers at Republic Windows and Doors, in Chicago, who also squatted and won severance pay from a company that wanted to throw them into the street. He’s outraged that working Americans could be tossed out of a job or a house, and no one can argue with that anger, or with his grief over the fate of his home town, Flint, Michigan, which was the subject of his first success, “Roger and Me,” twenty years ago. Michael Moore has never recovered emotionally from the closing of the G.M. plants in Flint. Once, it seems, there was a paradise, memorialized in home movies: his father worked at the AC Spark Plug plant, the family had plenty to eat and enough money to send the kids to school. In the movie’s most touching moment, Moore accompanies his father, now very old, as he stares in horror at the flattened wasteland where the plant once stood. But Moore is so mesmerized by Flint’s tragedies that he thinks G.M. went bankrupt because it closed plants in the eighties. Modern capitalism, with its torrential flow of money across borders, is beyond him. By the end of the movie, baffled, he resorts to his old gags: trying to get Henry Paulson, for example, on the phone to hold him accountable; wrapping Goldman Sachs’s New York headquarters in yellow crime-scene tape. It’s a sad movie—funny, yet wounded and bewildered. ♦
