Word: jewishes
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Stay through the end credits of Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man and you'll find the disclaimer: "No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture." That statement is open to dispute, since most of the film's characters are Jewish - residents of suburban Minneapolis in 1967 - and just about all of them, it seems, are out to harm the Coens' hapless hero, college physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlberg), either intentionally or just by ignoring his mostly mute cries for help...
...that the Coen brothers - who were raised in an academic Jewish family in Minneapolis, and were 13 and 10 respectively when the movie takes place - are self or other-hating Jews. But as filmmakers (and Oscar-winners, last year, for No Country for Old Men), they've always enjoyed anatomizing humanity's weak points and turning them into a kind of comedy. The lynch party, composed of Jews and gentiles, that assembles around Larry is full of these caricatures. And Larry was made to be intimidated, ignored, abused. He is a passive protagonist whose plight earns him as much pity...
Larry is a familiar figure from Jewish literature that dates back to the Old Testament and up to Bruce Jay Friedman's 1962 novel Stern, about a Jew who moves to the suburbs and endures a plague of abuse from neighbors and nature. The men at the center of Philip Roth's novels may rage and flail, but Larry doesn't dish out insults, he takes them. When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies, just suck it up and hope you don't explode. That's Larry's method of coping...
...movie has no stars, few recognizable faces. And unlike so many American films, which cast gentiles in Jewish roles (Imelda Staunton, for example, as the stereotype mother in Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock, also about suburban Jews in the '60s), this one actually has ethnic-appropriate casting. The Jews here are sometimes broadly drawn - Larry's family slurps soup at a decibel level that even the Simpsons would find deafening - but they're fully assimilated. Nobody says, "Oy vey!" or talks shtick. If people answer a question with a question, the first would be Larry's plaintive "Why me?" when...
...theory - "Even if you can't figure it out, you're still responsible for it on the midterm" - applies, in spades, to his crumbling life. And yet for most of the movie he hangs in there, behaving honorably, seeking the wisdom of his ancestors, trying to observe the Jewish concept of Hashem. "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you," says Elie Wiesel's Rashi. To absorb God's body blows, this disquieting, haunting movie says, is to be fully alive. To do otherwise could kill...