Jewish Gelt Complex

A Serious Man
Schlimazel Tov
Trailers & Mo | Official Website

College professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg, who looks like Joaquin Phoenix, but acts as good as River) is trying to keep his nice Jewish suburban life from falling apart, while trying to figure out why it’s falling apart. His wife (Sari Lennick) wants to run off with freshly widowed, serious-ier Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed, with his velvety Barry White voice), but they need his official blessing to make it a holy union in the eyes of their community. His brother Arthur (Richard Kind, a kinda guy we’d love to see more of in anything and everything) is a misguided sad sack with medical and genius issues, who has no job or home, and takes up space in his house, much to his family’s chagrin. His daughter (Jessica McManus) and son (Aaron Wolff) are needy teens, one wanting a nose job and the other a clear telly signal so he can watch F-Troop, when he probably should be working on his Haftorah portion. And that’s just the problems that exist within Larry’s home. Outside of it he’s got to deal with a gruff and tumble white-bred neighbor, a failing student attempting to bribe him for better grades, lawyers with gigantic hourly rates, the school’s board who are deciding his tenure fate, endless badgering phone calls from the Columbia Record Club (oddly with this anachronistic goof), and many other forms of agita that plagues poor Larry’s mind. He seeks answers in low places (from his pot smoking hottie neighbor, played by Amy Landecker) and from places with a higher calling (different Rabbis from his congregation, Simon Helberg and George Wyner, each who speak loudly, but with nothing really to say, cept about the marvels of parking lots and mysterious Hebrew-lettered teeth). Murphy’s law ru(l)es the day here and never lets up on Larry (thankfully he doesn’t f#ck a stranger in the a$$). It’s one long cringe-worthy affair, like what befell Gaylord Focker in Meet The Parents, yet there’s not much to laugh at, but there is a helluva lot to marvel at (bless you D.o.P Roger Deakins)

Judaism has dipped its toes in Ethan Coen and Joel Coen‘s films before (John Turturro in Barton Fink and Miller’s Crossing + the no rolling on Shabbos stylings of John Goodman in Lebowski), but with A Serious Man, it makes one giant plunge into a world filled with nothing but menches, noodniks, schleppers, schlemiels, schlimazels, and any other Yiddish plural nouns you could possibly think of. This mad Man world that they have conjured up rolls out in the late 60s, in an unnamed Midwestern town (filmed in Minnesota), which also happens to be the time and place the brothers Coen went from being boys II Bar Mitzvahed men. To call this their most personal film would be an understatement. To call it one of their most accomplished works wouldn’t eggzactly be an overstatement (esp since most of their films are accomplished, cept the intolerable Intolerable Cruelty). To call it a film that you cannot pass up whatsoever is what we simply call a statement (or maybe a command, as in we command you to see this!). There are only two warnings we muss raise: some of you gentiles (or goys, if you prefer that word) may feel a bit lost with all the nebbishness abound, and also, its got one of them No Country For Old Menesque ‘you call that an ending’ endings, but none of this should really matter when yer taking in one of the finesestest Jewish-oriented (non-Holocaust) films since The Ten Commandments. Eat yer farts out Woody Allen and Neil Simon!

Being Kind, Rewind: Richard Kind has one of the mos unforgettable faces in all of cinema. we’ve never forgotten it ever since we first came into contact with it in Vice Versa

Verdictgo: Breast In Show

A Serious Man opens in NY, LA and Minneapolis(!!!!) today, and elsewhere, elsewhen

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…