"You can't have it both ways!" -- Larry
"Embers isn't the forum for legalities -- you are so right! ... No one is playing the "blame game," Larry." -- Sy Ableman
"Accept mystery." -- Mr. Park
"Just look at the parking lot..." -- Rabbi Scott
So, an epistemological comedy as well as an existential one,² "A Serious Man" is a relentless inquiry into how we think we know what we think we know, and then asks where the knowing (or not knowing) gets us. It begins (after a fractal, Academy-ratio Yiddish folk-tale prologue with Fyvush Finkel as a Polish dybbuk -- with an all-important question mark, according to the end credits) deep inside an ear canal reverberating with the sounds of Jefferson Airplane: "When the truth is found to be lies / And all the joy within you dies..." A doctor examines a man we will soon know as Larry. A boy in a Hebrew school classroom listens to a transistor radio with a white plastic earphone. We don't know the connection between the man and the boy (are they the same person?) until later, when we learn that the kid is Larry's son Danny (Aaron Wolf), soon to be bar mitzvahed, a boy on the verge of becoming a man (but, also, still a boy -- not unlike his father).
[NOTE: I don't want to hazard even partially revealing some resonant, essential jokes -- and I've tried not to -- but if you haven't seen "A Serious Man," proceed at your own risk.]
Throughout, the Coens keep us as unsteady and off-balance as Larry in his encounters with: The sometimes naked-sunbathing next-door neighbor lady with the Mezuzah, Mrs. Samsky (Amy Landecker), who startles him by entering a room though a beaded curtain, two iced teas in hand, and asking: "Do you take advantage of the new freedoms?" (She does.) Or the gruff White Hunter (and grim mower, and stern baseball catch-player) who lives on the other side. Or the pleasant, hesitant man from the tenure committee who slants in Larry's office doorway (I can't explain how funny his italicized posture is), always threatening to drop some terrible news, but never quite delivering it. Or Clive, the implacable Korean student who failed an exam but seems to have an instinctive (or is it cultural?) understanding of Schrödinger's cat. Or Larry's miserable brother Arthur (Richard Kind), who is forever in the bathroom ("Out in a minute!"), draining a sebaceous cyst on the back of his neck and scribbling an intricate, book-length mathematical manuscript he calls "the Mentaculus." Or the multi-layered telling of the Tale of the Goy's Teeth. Even the business practices of the Columbia Record Club become a paralyzing Kafkaesque nightmare: by doing nothing, Larry keeps ordering the (unwanted) monthly selection again and again. How can this be?
The poster image, of Larry fiddling with the aerial on his roof (yes, even with all those traditions his life is as shaky as... as a you-know-what!), comes from one of the most precarious scenes -- much credit for which goes to the sound design, imagined by the Coens and realized with the invaluable expertise of longtime Coen collaborator Skip Lievsay. I'm not going to go over it here -- it simply involves seeing and hearing the neighborhood from this higher vantage -- but when this movie comes out on DVD I'd love to savor it shot by shot.
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