A Serious Man

At the end of Drag Me To Hell, Justin Long looks on with incomprehensible terror as the woman he loves, and the world as he knows it is ripped away from him, without any indication of why or how. That is what this entire movie is like. Whether by his own naiveté or mythical douchebaggery, the shitstorm Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg)'s life just keeps getting muckier and smellier, with simple answers like "it's all for the best," "this is how things are meant to be," or "God works in mysterious ways" seeming shallow and, most importantly, completely unhelpful.

The God thing gets tricky here. The film is about a Jewish man, and his Jewish family - including his son, who goes to Hebrew school - who seeks council in these hard times by consulting his local rabbis. There is a culture and a belief to which Larry belongs, and the movie presents it as such a rich, fortified culture that, after hearing one character speak, I started to wish I was Jewish. I don't even remember who said it, but she made the point that Larry should seek out a rabbi to discuss his problems because, as Jews, they have millenia of experience and stories to draw upon for support and inspiration during trying times. By the end, however, Larry is no closer to understanding his circumstances than when the poop first began to hit the fan. There is, however, this dangling carrot of reason, the promise that everything has happened for a reason. There is, in particular, one pair of simultaneous events that is too immense to ignore as coincidence. The film leaves us with the same feeling that Larry does, that there is a truth and a reason for everything that has happened to him, but also a helplessness for our inability to figure it all out.

This tone is set early on in an unconnected (except thematically) opening scene wherein, in an early 20th century Poland, a husband and wife disagree about whether the man the husband has just brought home is a person or a spirit. When the wife stabs the man with an icepick, prompting him to stumble out into the snow, bleeding from his chest, the husband looks on dumbfoundedly, unable ignore the potential murder that has just occurred, but at the same time, unable to convince his wife that she has done anything but protect their home from a malevolent spirit. The screen goes blank and we are left with no answers, no proof of the existence of God, but a hankering suspicion that He might very well exist, making it impossible to judge the wife, but impossible to ignore her actions.

A Serious Man is billed as a comedy, albeit a dark comedy. In order to watch it as such, you need to be able to laugh at the idea of seeing a man kicked when he's down. It's not even a real laugh, it's the kind of "Oh Come On!" twitchy laugh that Wile E. Coyote sometimes made before being crushed by a second anvil. It's a slow, downward roller-coaster ride through the proverbial tunnel with no trace of light at the end.

Rating: 3.5 stars