A Serious Man

There dwells an Ass-Head in our temple that will not be pleased with Slothrop's report, despite the principled esteem in which it holds this film. This is because the issue here is not whether this is a good movie or not (it is) but whether this movie is miraculous and on par with the Dude and Walter; that's the claim, and it must be addressed seriously, whether or not it was made in hyperbolic jest.

A Serious Man is a reworking of No Country For Old Men, but with a religious rather than a philosophical-existential framework, though the two add up to be pretty much the same thing. It asks the same questions: can we make sense of suffering? and what is the appropriate response to suffering? At the core is a rather unpleasant paradox: if we act righteously to the wrongs we encounter, we are questioning God's motives and faith becomes frivolous; but if we act passively, like Larry our protagonist (who's nowhere near as kick-ass our other Larry), we continue to encourage more and more wickedness because on this earth we are likely to be surrounded by men who will offer us a bottle of wine after fucking our wives. And what's worse about the latter silent suffering, is that it, too, is a form of righteousness––like the kid in the class who never raises his hand because he's too smart for the conversation. So in this universe, suffering exists, is arbitrary, and whether we accept or we protest, more tornadoes are on their way. Nothing miraculous here, just Biblical.

More entertaining is the way the movie questions our approach to how we see suffering itself: is it better to be literal or metaphorical about it? Would it be useful if vengeful ghosts were real? Does it matter if they're real or not? Can they be both literal and metaphorical? Can we even tell? And does one of these approaches lead us closer to an understanding of suffering than the other? The movie of course doesn't offer any answers, but here's Slothrop's main beef: the questions themselves tip too heavily to the literal side. The themes, in other words, are more or less spelled out throughout the movie, like when Larry explains that he doesn't understand Schrodinger's cat itself, because it's the math only that counts. Or the chorus that bookends the film "When the truth is found/ to be lies" is heard paradoxically from both the perspective of a young brat and an aged Rabbi about to keel over.

Miracles, I think, need to be somehow unhinged from reality. The Jesus is a miracle. Walter is a miracle. The Dude is a miracle. And, above all, Donnie is a miracle. But in A Serious Man, the miracles themselves become the object of scrutiny and that felt more to Slothrop like an exegesis of a story than a miraculous telling of one.