By Megan Carr of The Rest Is Cream Cheese.
Seriously good cinematography. Our "hero" atop his castle.
Of course, I got the hardest one. Me, the biggest slacker of the flock, I’ll wager, I get one of the most problematic, complex and intentionally snarky of all the Best Picture nominations. Those dang Coen brothers; just when you think you’ve got them figured out they throw us A Serious Man. Just when you think the critic’s voice is dead, they sucker everyone into thinking A Serious Man is genius. With a Metacritic score of 79% and a Tomatometer rating of 87%, I’m sure that when the Academy sat down to determine the nominees this year they were like, “Well, this one is a no brainer. Thank god for that, people, ‘cause we have 9 more flicks to pick and some of them have to actually be good. Hey, didn’t the Coen bros. do something insanely awesome a few years back?”
Best Picture nominees have often been crowd pleasers and critical successes (e.g. Out of Africa, Babe, Slumdog Millionaire) or arthouse-y films that are mainstream enough to get recognition (e.g. Moulin Rouge, Lost in Translation, Taxi Driver). Sometimes they are technical marvels or feature societal hot topics – homosexuality, racial cooperation/tension or a plethora of hobbits (e.g. I think you know which flicks I’m referring to). Of course, there are also the period pieces and biopics (which often go hand in hand) and those movies that have such a big studio push, it’s not a stretch to imagine they’d just purchase their own Oscar. Rarely is the nominee for Best Picture an all around, good, but relatively low-concept film like Up In The Air or 1982’s The Verdict. The Best Picture category has become synchronous with our nation’s increasing love of mediocrity; the grand crescendo is evident in this year’s picks. Ten movies instead of 4 or 5 – and not one of them is Moon…a righteous indignation I’ll save for another post. (OK, maybe not Best Picture worthy, but Rockwell was totally shafted.)
Back to the task at hand! A Serious Man is a tale about pathetic, Midwestern Jewish physics professor, Larry Gopnick whose problematic life threatens to devour him whole. Along with facing a tenure board, Larry is bribed by his student and saddled with his unemployed, probably autistic brother. Oh, and his wife is now dating Sy Ableman and wants a Get – a ritual divorce on top of a legal one. Sounds hilarious. No, I’m serious, it really does. I can see this being really funny in the Coens’ hands but I just couldn’t seem to laugh at the grotesque portrayals of the Jewish people at the center of the story. Not to mention how little difference any of it made in the end…just like in real life, except that in A Serious Man, God is played by two evil geniuses and Jefferson Airplane is always on the radio.
A seriously heavy metaphor. Larry's got the formula here somewhere.
Larry Gopnick is an unsympathetic putz. His family is horrible – his wife cheats on him, his daughter steals from him and his son only cares about F Troop and sweet, sweet reefer. Poor Larry doesn’t even have the chutzpah to get the time* from his relatively hot goyem neighbor. In his struggle to find meaning in the series of unfortunate events life’s thrown at him, Larry visits rabbi after rabbi and cliché after cliché through which the audience might begin to sense an overwhelming feeling of detachment. Suddenly, the audience finds themselves unable to get comfortable in their seats and the outside world starts creeping in. One member’s internal monologue might go, “Wait, are we out of bread or was it bread crumbs? Hmm, let me think about that for a while because I cannot keep my eyes on Larry’s cluster-cuss of a life.” A Serious Man is a sick, Schadenfreudian exercise that wears bleak and hopeless like a too-small suit coat. Yet every element of this tale of Job is perfect; each detail and line is clearly meticulously considered. Unfortunately, even this doesn’t make the film exciting or any less excruciating to endure. I’m not alone in thinking this. For every dozen “4 stars!” “seriously funny” and “a labor of love,” there are only a few who dared to commit contrary thoughts to print.
Very few.
Ella Taylor from the Village Voice writes, “…the visual impact of all these warty, unappetizing Jews (even the movie’s obligatory anti-Semite looks handsome by comparison) carries A Serious Man into the realm of the truly vicious.” David Denby at The New Yorker shares my sentiments, “As a piece of moviemaking craft, A Serious Man is fascinating; in every other way, it’s intolerable…The Coens’ humor is distant, dry, and shriveling, 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.”
It’s been well reported that the Coen’s loosely based this tale of Midwestern Jews in the 60’s on their own experience and much speculation has been made about their level of self hatred. Who knows how autobiographical it really is? I know Jewish families (like my own) and some of the characters in this movie really pissed me off. The accents, the throat clearing, the phony mysticism, and the greasy, mocking sheen of nihilism all over the film– it’s not a dark comedy, it’s just hateful and offensive. With one inside joke after the other, the Coen Brothers maintain that the real joke is on the audience for attempting to care about these hideous people or what happens to them. By the end I wanted the lot of them to perish (and I wanted to see it happen, damn it!), but the Coens denied me even that simple pleasure.
But, what if I don't want to hug it out? Larry and Sy, bosom buddies.
So we have to ask ourselves, does the critical success of a movie like this prove that the critic’s voice is still influential or does it merely reinforce sheep-like thinking (present LAMB’s excluded, of course) of some bloggers, journos and talking heads out there? Whether characters are blue or Jew, are reviewers too scared to break from the majority and let us know what they really think? I certainly hope not. But, the Academy has spoken and now A Serious Man will remain on the “best of” list in perpetuity and the handful of people that didn’t like it don’t matter one iota. Hey, maybe now I get it.
*Euphemism for doin’ it per J.D. Salinger.
P.S. Go, Katherine!! You’ve got the DGA’s blessing to kick some blue cat ass.
