A Serious Man: BD Review
|
Page 1 of 3 Universal / 2009 / 105 Minutes / Rated R / Street Date: February 9, 2010
I was ready to count them out. I really was. It took me a couple times to recognize The Big Lebowski's majesty (I wonder in hindsight what took me so damned long), and I'll say exceptional things about all their output leading up to the Dude's tale - except for maybe Blood Simple - but after that one, the Coen brothers fell off the radar for me. I found O Brother, Where Art Thou? to be a messy yet noble experiment,, and I liked The Man Who Wasn't There quite a bit, but with Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, I was simply appalled: Who was making these films? These are Coen brothers movies - they should be better than this! Luckily that anger was silenced with the stunning No Country for Old Men - Hell, even the zany mania of Burn After Reading was a hoot. But it wasn't until I saw A Serious Man that they really reminded me that the mussed-up spark of the Coen brothers' unique style was still alive and kicking. Far less user-friendly than Old Men, A Serious Man is the kind of movie that fits in perfectly alongside quirky Coen classics like Barton Fink and Miller's Crossing: It's loopy, insane and hard to pin down, but it is without any reservation whatsoever one of the greatest efforts the Coens have made to date.
The film's 19th century prologue makes quickly clear that viewers will need to keep up with A Serious Man - even on my third viewing (I've already watched the film twice on Blu-ray), I still have to figuratively count on my fingers and toes to wrap my brain around what goes on in this opening. A man comes to an Eastern European cottage, and a husband and wife greet him - the man thinks the guy's an old friend; the woman is convinced he's a dybbuk, an undead zombie of sorts. This prologue ends with blood (we'll leave it at that), and then we swish to 1967 Minnesota, where physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is having, shall we say, some troubles. As we dive into Larry's world, we're met with marital issues - Larry's wife (Sari Lennick) has decided to shack up with their family friend Sy Albeman (Fred Melamed) - as well as trouble with his ailing brother (Richard Kind), his pot-smoking teenaged son (Aaron Wolff), and a foreign exchange student of his (David Kang) who may or may not be bribing the prof for a passing grade. But A Serious Man is no plain melodrama - within minutes of being introduced to the ins and outs of Larry's buzzed-out day-to-day life, it becomes readily apparent that the Coens want to illuminate their protagonist's story by blurring the edges of reality and perception in provocative, ballsy ways. There are dream sequences, a sinfully profound interaction with an elderly Rabbi toward film's end, and - not to build it up too much, but... - inarguably the greatest final scene in any film from 2009. I can't exactly tell you what it means, per se, but I am certain that I love it. |
Comments (0)