A Serious Man

We don’t go on the park this morning because despite some heavy rain dog training this afternoon is on. At which MD is hopeless, although in his defence I suppose he has had a few weeks off and also he gets into a fight, which in his defence, I would say wasn’t really his fault. I’m always sticking up for that dog.

Meanwhile L is out running and cycling. I’ve done a bit of maintenance on her bike for her, swapping her back to bog standard flat pedals and reassembled her bike computer for her, putting back the parts I had stolen to fix mine. When she gets back after an hour’s cycle she tells me she’s done a grand total of 0.38km. Ah, she likes to take it steady but not that steady. I think I may have reassembled it wrong.

Later we’re at the cinema only to find that our membership cards have expired. So we have to fork out on renewal fees. The upside is our first two films are free, so tonight’s is a freebie and what a weird one it is. Then again it is the new Coen Brothers’ film, so what did we expect.

‘A Serious Man’ is clearly a dig at the lives and faith of a Jewish community in late 1960s America but of course if you don't know a whole lot about the Jewish faith then you could be stumbling from the off.

Just to make sure you are stumbling from the off, the film opens with a possibly irrelevant, possibly not, prologue set a century or two earlier and spoken all in subtitled Yiddish. In it a woman stabs an old man because she thinks he's a dybbuk, that’s a dead person possessed by an evil spirit. She’s wrong because the old man starts to bleed before getting up and wandering off into the snow outside. Does this action perhaps lead to a curse being bestowed up on someone? There’s no way of knowing for sure.

Could this someone be Larry Gopnik, a physics professor who is the main focus of this story? Larry is hoping for a life long tenure from his University but things are slowly starting to go wrong for him. Not least of which is an anonymous letter writer trying to derail the tenure.

On top of this his family life in comfortable suburbia is rocked when his wife informs him that their marriage is over and she wants to marry someone else. This someone else is, inexplicably, Sy Ableman, supposedly a pillar stone of the local community but in reality a patronizing old git. Meanwhile his kids are proving to be even more of a handful than kids are supposed to be. His son likes to dabble in marijuana and is consequently in debt to the school bully, is running up debts on an account with a record club at his Father’s unwilling expense whilst generally being more concerned about the poor reception on the TV than his studies.



Then there’s Larry’s daughter, who is saving up for a nose job with money straight out of Larry’s wallet and spending the rest of her time washing her hair, that is when she can get in the bathroom. Larry brother is occupying the bathroom, when he’s not sleeping on the coach, bringing to the family his medical, social and gambling problems. Larry is incredibly hopeless in the face of all this adversity and his wife soon banishes both him and his brother to the Jolly Roger Motel.

At least this gets him away from his goy (non-Jew) neighbour who is encroaching on Larry’s garden with his building plans but not from the Korean student who is pushing envelopes of cash onto Larry to persuade him to upgrade the F he gave him, while simultaneously threatening to sue him for defamation...

Now let’s just stop right there shall we. If you’ve broken cinema rules and not turned your phone off, then perhaps you ought to fire up Google right now. Google ‘Schrödinger's cat’, which is something we see Larry teaching to his physics students. Do it now, rather than afterwards like I had to.

Schrödinger's rather unpleasant, and hopefully theoretical, experiment consists of a live cat, a vial of Hydrogen Cyanide and a small amount of radioactive substance all together in the same box. If even a single atom of the radioactive substance decays, a relay mechanism will break the vial with a hammer and the cat will die. The point of it all is that no one can know what is happening in the box without looking inside it. Therefore according to the laws of quantum physics, the cat must be assumed to be in a superposition of states, e.g. both dead and alive at the same time. It is only when someone opens the box that they can find out the condition of the cat.



The F grade student and his father have grasped the theory of Schrödinger's cat, if not the maths of it, which is why he got an F. Like the cat, their bribe is seemingly alive and dead at the same time until Larry decides what action he is going to take. This film is possibly far too deep for its own good.



So, Larry, along with us (the audience), is slowly going out of his mind, particularly as a mathematician he’s used to things adding up, and he goes off to consult with the local Rabbis to find out just what he’s done to upset Hashem (God).

A junior rabbi tells him 'things aren’t so bad' and cites the car park as proof of the wonders of God. Larry isn’t impressed.

A more experienced rabbi rambles on for ages about a dentist who desperately tried to find the meaning of the Hebrew words 'Help Me’ that he found engraved on the inside of a goy patient's teeth but he finds no meaning. Larry isn’t impressed. Perhaps the rabbi is telling Larry he’s better off not worrying about it, sometimes there are no reasons for things that happen in life. Perhaps the Coen brothers are telling us we’re better off not worrying about trying to find meaning in this film.

The only person in the film who threatens to come up any answers is the lawyer enlisted to solve the problems Larry is having with his neighbours encroachment but the lawyer drops down dead just as he’s about to deliver up his findings.

The most senior rabbi of all, Rabbi Marshak, won't even see Larry. He’s seemingly too busy listening to a transistor radio confiscated from Danny, Larry’s son. This, after Danny’s Bar Mitzvah to which Danny turns up stoned, is returned to him by Rabbi Marshak.

So the story rambles and roams all over the place and goes nowhere and everywhere. This isn't unusual in a Coen's film but usually the journey to nowhere is a bit more exceptional than this or perhaps you just needed to be Jewish. It has the usual dark comedy laughs but it’s certainly not hilarious. It all makes for a very strange and challenging film.

Folk in the know say the film is a retelling of the book of Job from the Hebrew Bible, in which God and Satan bet on whether Job will remain faithful as Satan makes life as uncomfortable for Job as he can. Apparently the three consultations, even the whirlwind that comes at the end, it’s all in there. Yep, this film is definitely far too deep for its own good.

So does Larry remain faithful? Well so far he has, unlike Sy Ableman who was attempting to take another man’s wife. Suddenly God seems to get even with Sy and he dies in a road accident, coincidentally the same road accident that Larry is involved in, but he escapes unhurt.

Finally Larry cracks. He gives into temptation with the Jewish woman next door who sunbathes nude and invites Larry to ‘take advantage of the new freedoms’. Then he rubs out the Korean’s F grade... and the cat is dead. Then it just ends, in Coens style, with a ‘come see me’ call from his Doctor and a whirlwind approaching his Son’s school.



This is probably one of those films that grow on you. In fact the more L and I discuss it and the more I Google it, the more I like it but basically it helps if you know a bit about quantum physics, a lot about the Hebrew bible and oh, perhaps a bit of familiarity with the music of Jefferson Airplane.