A Serious Man dir. by Joel and Ethan Coen (review)

Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.¹

Thus opens Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man (2009), and a great deal does happen to title character Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg). Crises great and small plague Gopnik over the summer of 1967 in suburban Minnesota. His typically mischievous children Sarah and Danny (Jessica Mc-Manus and Aaron Wolff) are constantly at each other’s throats; his live-in brother Arthur (Richard Kind) hogs the family’s single bathroom; his overbearing wife Judith (Sari Lennik) and her pseudo-sympathetic lover Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed) ridicule Larry with the apparent normality of their affair. At work, student Clive Park (David Kang) haunts Gopnik after the physics professor fails Park on an exam, and the chair of Gopnik’s tenure committee keeps making comments that push Larry to question his future as a scholar.

Much of A Serious Man feels like the darkly comical side of The Wonder Years. The Gopniks’ Levittown-like suburban neighborhood would be a postcard image of 1960s middle class family life if not for class bully Mike Fagle (Jon Kaminski Jr.) chasing Danny Gopnik down the street every day, for grouchy neighbor Mr. Brandt (Peter Breitmayer), or for the nude sunbathing of Mrs. Samsky (Amy Landecker), which both delights and conflicts Larry. The various annoyances that sit at the center of almost every scene in the film—the “everything that happens to you”—avoid casting the era in too nostalgic a light.

Yet the past is recognizable here. Children Sarah and Danny grapple with timeless problems of youth. Sarah can never wash her hair before going out with friends because Uncle Arthur is constantly in the bathroom, while Danny forever is trying to watch F Troop over an always-fuzzy aerial (the attempted repair of which provides Larry with the opportunity to see Mrs. Samsky au naturel over the patio fence). A string of thefts brings further woe to both children: money Sarah stole from Larry’s wallet is, in turn, stolen by Danny to pay off a small debt to the class pot dealer. This subplot is one of the film’s lighter elements, as is the false linguistic bravado on display throughout. Sarah prefers to call Danny “brat, fucker,” and one of Danny’s schoolmates refers to just about everyone and everything as some variation on “that fucker.”

But how does the film portray the American Midwest? A Serious Man is set in a “typically” midwestern locale—in this case, suburban Minnesota—in three ways. First, the town’s residential space is comprised almost entirely of identical, small ranch houses in a treeless neighborhood. Our limited exposure to other models of residence and leisure, such as the large house and the country club, conveys a certain sense of economic stratification, but not one so strong as to introduce explicit class antagonism into the narrative.

Second, while following Professor Gopnik during the course of his working day, the viewer is not treated to a campus overgrown with the collegiate Gothic buildings that typically convey intellectual prestige and social cachet. Instead, Larry works in a brick building so stereotypical of 1960s commercial architecture that one could imagine a dentist’s office or an accounting firm down the hall from the physics department. The message is clear: Professor Gopnik is a smart guy, but he is only an average scholar, punching the proverbial time card in a bid for tenure-by-waiting. The film features a workmanlike approach to academia that suggests terms like “groundbreaking” or “esteemed” cannot really be applied to the scholarship here.

Third, A Serious Man’s community is overwhelmingly homogenous in terms of both race and religion. The vast majority of the community is white and Jewish. When an “outsider” does appear via the character of Korean student Clive Park, he becomes a source of continuous anxiety for Larry. The audience is in no doubt as to what Park means for the film’s presentation of midwestern communities: everyone here is the same.

There is a bit of...