No Country For Old Men had intense characters entwined in a tight plot with great dialogue and an ending that left some wondering why it had. Burn After Reading was an interwoven mess of gurning by its vacuous protagonists. A Serious Man seems to want to meld the two but has emerged without a motive.
There is little to keep the attention in the plot of A Serious Man. This is soap opera territory. It details a mere blip in a character’s life and not the most dramatic event. Of course this is what they are getting at. This man is so mundane that any offbeat event will be a death. It does not work for the audience like that. To sit and watch the searching of a humdrum soul, a naïf with wide eyes in every scene, is tedium.
The Comedy
Michael Stuhlbarg, as Larry Gopnik, is not at fault here. His ineffectuality is as affectingly nebbish as a Woody Allen character. In fact there are good performances from all, especially newcomer Aaron Wolff. And there is relief in the beautiful photography by Roger Deakins, who paints suburban parts of Minnesota wonderfully, but also the interior, thus giving the film a sense of place.
The soundtrack also tethers the film. A sixties soundtrack that plays with nostalgia but in no way refreshes the age. This film is so ingrained with the smugness of the day that there is hardly escape. It suffocates.
Secondary comedic characters allow us up for air - the stoned son at his bah mitzvah, the uncle’s draining of his evil cyst and the consequences of his releasing himself into the community - but these are not the story of the serious man. We are trapped with him and his almost inaction in the screen.
The Drama
Gopnik searches for a reason to the unraveling of his life. It is a quest through dreams and the poking of rabbis but all it proves is that futility is truth, and that if god is there he cares nought for the little squirming man on earth. These may be valid theosophical dilemmas but they do not make for great entertainment in the cinema. Ultimately it is a pointless film that tries to provoke laughter at that very point.
A Serious Mien
The unending of the film, its inconsequentiality, highlights this and underscores it totally. This is no big drama, more the skewering of a certain type, and an easy target at that. One we can all laugh at. But it is empty laughter. For the Coen Brothers it is time to remine that serious vein. One with some blood in it.
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