Outward Flourishes

This brilliant trailer is from the latest Cohen brother’s film A Serious Man, a methodic and suffocating dissection of nothing and nothingness in late sixties’ Minnesota. Since the trailer seems to contain the general gist of the plot, I’m going to restrict myself to some general remarks on the relationship of the film’s characters to the cascade of unfortunate events unfolding around them.

Central to the film is the aptly explored absurdity that none of the characters is called to question their existence until removed from a passive, contained state of affairs most commonly associated with routine and stability. That is exactly what happens to Lawrence Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), your average likeable Jewish math teacher, who becomes entangled in a web of permanent confusion when confronted with a death in the family (of sorts), a harmless car crash, a rebellious teen, the shadow of an upcoming divorce and some problems at work.

True to life, the film suggest it’s human nature to coast along one’s linear existence, using up its fractures as they come along to reexamine the course of events and gain a new outlook or even renewed resolve. Sadly for Larry, these fractures start piling up left and right, barely affording him the time to properly absorb their slings. Knee-deep into this onslaught of darkly humourous misfortunes, the spectator is left to wonder whether something so simple as Larry’s marriage could work at all: surely it would be hard t conceive that pair living in perfect harmony, even without all the adversities du jour.

Larry’s relationship with his brother Arthur — a sickly but portly fellow with a perpetually overflowing cyst and a penchant for drawing gibberish equations on a notebook – tends to reinforce this point. Introduced as a stoic figure of continuous ailments, he is portrayed as a man who rarely complains despite clearly having it much worse than poor old Larry.  For the latter can at least bask in the warm comfort of having raised a dysfunctional family and retaining a job. Eventually Arthur’s woes simply become too heavy to bear in silence; chased by the FBI for illegal gambling and soliciting, he sinks into riotous despair and gives voice to some of the bleakest moments on film. Unchanging, monochord happiness we can deal with. It’s always the overflowing cup that tends to wake people up to their misery.

At that point, the movie takes a remarkably asphyxiating turn as every character poses the same question that has been uttered down since Job. Why? Why must this happen to Larry, the upstanding citizen and father of two? Where are the answers? Larry then seeks the rabbis at his synagogue, going through their seniority as one trudges through several telephone layers of enraging customer support. The junior rabbis offer him platitudes. The elder, unfortunately, is just a mossy old man passing commendations on boys who have just gone through their bar mitzvah. He likes to quote Jefferson Airplane, too.

Who doesn’t? Except that this sense of dread and disorientation is superbly compounded by the Cohens’ construction of an oppressive physical space out of sheer open spaces, in a chiaroscuro of overtly vibrant surges of characteristic 60′s joie de vivre against the blandness of the real lives behind the myth modernly ascribed to the decade. Agoraphobia never worked so well in the silver screen; those tightly knit communities and suburbian houses all seem to scream that as humans need open spaces, they also need boundaries, and the film’s open-ended lawns and bright stretches of concrete end up creating an eerie aura of discomfort. Ultimately, the freedom they afford also fosters conflicts between their dwellers. When Larry climbs to the roof  to repair the TV antenna, he enacts an ascension which could be seen as an attempt to establish some sort of territorial superiority in his surroundings as well as a desperate and highly basic mechanism for regaining perspective. He sees nothing — and gains nothing — but in the meantime he buys himself another dilemma as he overlooks a milfy neighbour sunbathing au naturel behind a cubicle of closed fences who later turns out to be quite the predatory housewife.

In Larry’s view, at least. Interestingly enough, while his disorientation is real, some of the episodes are presented in a dreamlike sequence. Larry becomes a hazy and unreliable narrator to himself (which only adds to the confusion) and I have to admit being moved by some of the film’s intensely foreboding moments – when human despair is almost palpable and the best minds are reduced to bleating some pathetic camusian laments and clawing for a splinter of meaning.

The Cohens deserve great praise for encapsulating this sense of contained confusion in a considerably mature frame, on which they sprinkle a brand of humour that serves to enlighten it (and lighten it) rather than defraud it (and debase it). Atypical even by their standards, at once disarming and pithy in its bleak and structured look on this life, this is the kind of movie without a real ending or a real beginning (it seems to end with, in fact,  with what in any other instance would have been considered a mid-movie plot-twist). It won’t offer such vague commendation as the one ambiguously cast upon Job in the aftermath of his toils, nor will it even register as a film capable of delivering a traditional payoff. In more layers than one, the message is simply that… men must endure their going hence. So stop worrying and be miserable.