The Sorrow and the Pity 2 : Electric Bugaloo

I’m a serious Coen Bros. fan so it was only a matter of time before I got my jew-y self over to the multiplex for the jewtastic and jexrageous (and did I mention Jewish-themed) A SERIOUS MAN. Like their last film BURN AFTER READING the Coen’s have provided a challenging little nugget – hard to love, unabashedly quirky, yet (in my opinion) eminently defensible as a movie that offers something wholly unlike what we’ve seen before.

Which may seem like filmy jibberish, after all a good movie is a good movie, right? We can watch the masterpiece that is FARGO and say, unequivocally: this is a good film. We all saw NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and joined in the chorus of praise and awards – no reservations there. But when BURN AFTER READING came out, the Coens’ train came to a sudden and deafening halt. Suddenly it seemed that, for a creative team responsible for so many quote unquote important movies, what happened that they would produce a movie so…so…frivolous.

Of course, for me, BURN’s frivolousness, its joyous insignificance, its rejection of the very concept of oeuvre, is what it made it such a success. Very few people liked this film, but I did…although I would be hard pressed to say I loved it. It’s literally a film that gives you a few funny characters and zany situations and then self-destructs. I remember almost no plot details, I don’t have any real desire to return to it, I thought Brad Pitt was kind of annoying…yet for everything it wasn’t, BURN was exactly what the Coen’s wanted it to be: frivolous, disposable, violent popcorn. And this coming on the heels of No Country’s Academy Award deluge…this my friends is not at accident.

For there are no accidents in the Coens’ world, especially not in A SERIOUS MAN – where every step or misstep is the explicit work of HASHEM. We may not understand why things happen the way they do, but Judaism and the Coen’s own perversity remind us that cause and effect is a celestial process. Ours is not to ask why, after all.

Every time I watch a Coens film, I feel like the filmmakers are testing themselves and their capabilities, and it’s a challenge that is always pleasurable to behold. If the Coens were seeing just how unserious a movie they could make with BURN AFTER READING, in A SERIOUS MAN I get the sense that they are playing with the very idea of causality. As in life, in A SERIOUS MAN there is no accounting for what will happen. Just when we think Sy Ablemen is our antagonist, Sy Ableman dies. Just when a moral choice is explored, a doctor’s phone call renders the choice unimportant. When we are finally able to repay a debt, a tornado appears to wipe everyone’s slate clean. An escape is a dream sequence; a dream is a fantasy. Irreconcilable differences become reconcilable, or at least begin to seem so, watching ones stoned child read from the Torah on his Bar Mitzvah. And if these seem like a random list of unconnected events, that’s because it is. And if it seems a bit easy to pile erratic plot happenings onto one giant, chaotic heap of a film: that’s because it is.

But even if the plot is “easy” in the sense that it doesn’t burden itself with excessive structural demands, this doesn’t mean that it is unintelligent. And it doesn’t mean that this film as a whole is anything less than an important Coen Bros. offering. There are a few missteps: the Yiddish-language prologue doesn't really have a clear conneciton with the rest of the film (besides it jewiness) and the structural device of breaking the chapters up according to rabbis, while it helps to drive forward the plodding action, is indeed a bit obvious. But even if it isn't perfect, I am pretty sure it’s seriously good.