Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta A Serious Man. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta A Serious Man. Mostrar todas las entradas
16.12.09
Nominaciones: Chicago Film Critics
BEST PICTURE
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
A Serious Man
Up in the Air
Where the Wild Things Are
BEST DIRECTOR
Kathryn Bigelow (-) The Hurt Locker
Joel & Ethan Coen (-) A Serious Man
Spike Jonze (-) Where the Wild Things Are
Jason Reitman (-) Up in the Air
Quentin Tarantino (-) Inglourious Basterds
BEST ACTOR
Jeff Bridges (-) Crazy Heart
George Clooney (-) Up in the Air
Matt Damon (-) The Informant!
Jeremy Renner (-) The Hurt Locker
Michael Stuhlbarg (-) A Serious Man
BEST ACTRESS
Abbie Cornish (-) Bright Star
Carey Mulligan (-) An Education
Maya Rudolph (-) Away We Go
Gabourey Sidibe (-) Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
Meryl Streep (-) Julie & Julia
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Peter Capaldi (-) In the Loop
Woody Harrelson (-) The Messenger
Christian McKay (-) Me and Orson Welles
Stanley Tucci (-) The Lovely Bones
Christoph Waltz (-) Inglourious Basterds
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Vera Farmiga (-) Up in the Air
Anna Kendrick (-) Up in the Air
Mo’Nique (-) Precious
Julianne Moore (-) A Single Man
Natalie Portman (-) Brothers
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Away We Go (-) Dave Eggers & Vendela Vida
The Hurt Locker (-) Mark Boal
Inglourious Basterds (-) Quentin Tarantino
A Serious Man (-) Joel & Ethan Coen
Up (-) Bob Peterson
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
An Education (-) Nick Hornby
In the Loop (-) Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci & Tony Roche
The Informant! (-) Scott Z. Burns
Up in the Air (-) Jason Reitman & Sheldon Turner
Where the Wild Things Are (-) Spike Jonze & Dave Eggers
BEST DOCUMENTARY
Anvil!: The True Story of Anvil
Capitalism: A Love Story
The Cove
Food, Inc.
Tyson
BEST FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILM
Broken Embraces
Red Cliff
Sin Nombre
Summer Hours
The White Ribbon
BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Coraline
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Ponyo
The Princess and the Frog
Up
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Avatar (-) Mauro Fiore
Bright Star (-) Greig Fraser
The Hurt Locker (-) Barry Ackroyd
Inglourious Basterds (-) Robert Richardson
Where the Wild Things Are (-) Lance Acord
BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
Avatar (-) James Horner
Fantastic Mr. Fox (-) Alexandre Desplat
The Informant! (-) Marvin Hamlisch
Up (-) Michael Giacchino
Where the Wild Things Are (-) Carter Burwell & Karen Orzolek
MOST PROMISING PERFORMER
Sharlto Copley (-) District 9
Christian McKay (-) Me and Orson Welles
Carey Mulligan (-) An Education
Max Records (-) Where the Wild Things Are
Gabourey Sidibe (-) Precious
MOST PROMISING FILMMAKER
Neill Blomkamp (-) District 9
Scott Cooper (-) Crazy Heart
Cary Fukunaga (-) Sin Nombre
Duncan Jones (-) Moon
Marc Webb (-) (500) Days of Summer
3.11.09
Esperando por Mar del Plata
"A Serious Man", de los hermanos Coen (película de apertura)2.10.09
"A Serious Man", de Joel y Ethan Coen (Los Angeles Times)
Joel and Ethan Coen make their most personal, most intensely Jewish film, which turns out to be one of their most universal as well.
By KENNETH TURAN
Film Critic
October 2, 2009
"If not now, when?" the Jewish sage Hillel famously asked, and with "A Serious Man" the Coen brothers have answered.
Writer-directors Joel and Ethan have seized the opportunity afforded by the Oscar-winning success of "No Country for Old Men," to make their most personal, most intensely Jewish film, a pitch-perfect comedy of despair that, against some odds, turns out to be one of their most universal as well.
Set in a very specific time and place -- the Jewish community in suburban Minneapolis circa 1967 -- that closely echoes the Coens' own background, "A Serious Man" is a memory piece re-imagined through the darkest possible lens.
Yet the more the man of the title suffers the torments of Job, the more he tries to deal with the unknowability of the usual willfully absurd and decidedly hostile Coen universe, the more we're encouraged to wonder if this isn't just the tiniest bit funny. And the more real the pain becomes, the more, in a quintessentially Jewish way, laughter becomes our only serious option.
The serious man in question is Larry Gopnik (Tony-nominated actor Michael Stuhlbarg), a university professor who's up for tenure in physics. Married with two children and the standard suburban house, he's always tried to live up to expectations, tried to be the best person he can, so he's totally unprepared when every aspect of his life begins to collapse in a slow-motion riot.
First, his wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), tells him out of the blue that she's leaving the marriage for, of all people, the whale-like Sy Abelman (Fred Melamed), an acquaintance as unctuous as he is pompous. Which is very.
At the university, a persistent South Korean student (David Kang) is trying every method, moral and otherwise, to improve his grade. The chairman of the tenure committee is getting anonymous letters assailing Gopnik's alleged moral turpitude. And the man himself keeps getting dunning phone calls from a record club he's never heard of.
Meanwhile, Gopnik's children, the marijuana-smoking, Jefferson-Airplane-listening, about-to-be-bar-mitzvahed Danny (Aaron Wolff) and his frantic sister, Sarah (Jessica McManus), are too self-involved to be much help. And his visiting brother, Arthur (a fearless Richard Kind), spends much of his time draining a sebaceous cyst on his neck and is even more of a wreck than Larry is.
Outside the house, things in Gopnik's bleak prairie subdivision are not an improvement. His possibly anti-Semitic neighbor (Peter Breitmayer) is encroaching on his property, and the willingness of the comely Mrs. Samsky (Amy Landecker) to sunbathe in the nude is more disorienting than anything else. It gets so bad that Gopnik's only dubious relaxation is listening to bass Sidor Belarsky's ultra-lugubrious rendition of a Yiddish song called "The Miller's Tears."
As his woes increase biblically, Gopnik tries with increasing desperation to find out why this is happening to him. He consults a divorce attorney (Adam Arkin) and not one but three rabbis, and he hears a fantastical story about a Hebrew cry for help engraved on a goy's teeth, only to come to fear that what he guessed all along might be the case: It's not always easy to find out what God is trying to tell us.
On one level -- actually, on many levels -- "A Serious Man" is not exactly a happy story, but one of the things that makes it as involving as it is is the formidible filmmaking skill the Coens have honed in more than 25 years of collaboration.
Doing their own editing (under the longtime pseudonym Roderick Jaynes) and working with such regulars as cinematographer Roger Deakins, costume designer Mary Zophres, composer Carter Burwell, co-casting director Ellen Chenoweth and production designer Jess Gonchor, the Coens have so exactly made the film they envisioned that it is hard not to be drawn in. Working largely with unfamiliar actors, their trademark blurring of the line between serious and comic has never been as artfully done as it is here.
More than that, his mountain of woes notwithstanding, Larry Gopnik just might be the most out-and-out normal person ever to be put at the center of a Coen brothers film, and his everyman status helps explain one of the film's apparent paradoxes: its ability to be both intensely Jewish and speak to everyone.
On the one hand, "A Serious Man" is rife with specific Jewish references, like the great cantor Yossele Rosenblatt. It starts with a quote from Rashi and a Yiddish-language parable set in Eastern Europe starring the veteran Fyvush Finkel as someone who may or may not be a dybbuk and ends with the classic credit line, "No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture."
Yet it's impossible to watch Larry Gopnik's travails without feeling that they will speak to everyone who's been battered and blindsided by life's tormenting crises and wonders why. By being so site-specific, the Coens have broadened their reach and expanded their touch.
"I've tried to be a serious man. I've tried to do right," Gopnik laments more than once. Haven't we all, this unexpected film, at once comic and haunting, asks. Haven't we all?
"A Serious Man", de Joel y Ethan Coen (The New York Times)
Did you hear the one about the guy who lived in the land of Uz, who was perfect and upright and feared God? His name was Job. In the new movie version, “A Serious Man,” some details have been changed. He’s called Larry Gopnik and he lives in Minnesota, where he teaches physics at a university. When we first meet Larry, in the spring of 1967, his tenure case is pending, his son’s bar mitzvah is approaching, and, as in the original, a lot of bad stuff is about to happen, for no apparent reason.
At work, Larry specializes in topics like Schrödinger’s Paradox and the Heisenberg Principle — complex and esoteric ideas that can be summarized by the layman, more or less, as “God knows.” Because we can’t. Though if he does, he isn’t saying much.
Larry, played with poignant, brow-furrowed deadpan by Michael Stuhlbarg, does not exactly fear the divinity whom he, like other devout Jews, calls Hashem (“the name” in Hebrew). It’s more that he’s puzzled, beleaguered, perplexed. What does God want from us? What should we expect from him? As weird inconveniences spiral into operatic miseries, Larry dutifully searches for clues, answers, signs. He talks to learned rabbis and listens to recordings of famous cantors. What he encounters, apart from haunting music and drab suburban sacred architecture, is silence, nonsense and — from that metaphysical zone beyond the screen, where the rest of us sit and watch — laughter.
“How odd of God” goes an old bit of doggerel “to choose the Jews.” And how perversely fitting that Joel and Ethan Coen, who wrote and directed “A Serious Man,” should elect to examine the deep peculiarity and calamitous consequences of this choice. The vein of fatalistic, skeptical humor that runs through so many of their movies has frequently had a Jewish inflection, both cultural and metaphysical. Here, that inheritance, glancingly present in movies like “Barton Fink” and “The Big Lebowski,” is, so to speak, the whole megillah.
“A Serious Man” begins with a narrow-screen, Yiddish-language dramatization of an ersatz folk tale about a tzadik (Fyvush Finkel) who may or may not be a dybbuk. (A righteous man who might be a ghost. You see how much is lost in translation?)
The story is at once hilarious and horrific, its significance both self-evident and opaque. The same could be said of most of the Coen brothers’ movies, in which human existence and the attempt to find meaning in it are equally futile, if also sometimes a lot of fun. (For us, at least.) Their insistence on the fundamental absence of a controlling order in the universe is matched among American filmmakers only by Woody Allen. The crucial difference is that the Coens are compulsive, rigorous formalists, as if they were trying in the same gesture to expose, and compensate for, the meaninglessness of life.
So a question put before the congregation by “A Serious Man” is whether it makes the case for atheism or looks at the world from a divine point of view. Are the Coens mocking God, playing God or taking his side in a rigged cosmic game? What’s the difference?
The philosophical conundrums in “A Serious Man” can be posed only in jest — or, at least, in the cultural tradition of Ashkenazic Judaism that stretches from the shtetls of Poland to the comedy clubs of the Catskills, that is how they tend to be posed. But a deep anxiety lurks beneath the jokes, and though “A Serious Man” is written and structured like a farce, it is shot (by Roger Deakins), scored (by Carter Burwell) and edited (by the Coens’ pseudonymous golem Roderick Jaynes) like a horror movie.
Everything that happens to Larry takes on a sinister cast. A student (David Kang) protests an “unjust” grade and tries to bribe him. Someone is sending letters to the tenure committee smearing Larry’s good name, while the Columbia Record Club peppers him with dunning calls. His brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), at work on a mad mystico-mathematical text that will unlock the secrets of the cosmos, has moved into Larry’s ranch-style house, taking his physical and mental health issues with him.
And in that house there is sibling warfare (between the bar mitzvah boy, played by Aaron Wolff, and his older sister, played by Jessica McManus), poor reception on the television and, all of a sudden, a collapsed marriage. Larry’s wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), has taken up with an older widower named Sy Ableman (the splendidly unctuous Fred Melamed) — allegory, anyone? — who pompously lays claim to the movie’s title role.
Forget plot summary, though. “A Serious Man,” like “No Country for Old Men” and “Burn After Reading,” is fundamentally a shaggy dog story. But while it is funnier than either of those movies, it also has more gravity to it. This is not just because it represents something of a homecoming for the brothers, who grew up in the heavily Jewish Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park in the 1960s. They are hardly the kind to be sentimental about the old neighborhood. But in that milieu their smart-alecky nihilism feels authentic rather than arch — you understand, maybe for the first time, where they are coming from.
“A Serious Man” continues their nonsequential, decade-by-decade, movie-guided tour of American history. And, as usual, a lot of history is left off screen: the ’60s is pot, the Jefferson Airplane and a slight shift in attitudes toward what Judith calls “whoopsie-doopsie.” But if they are diffident about the politics of the time — or perhaps just cleverly oblique —their sociological sense is unusually acute, if also exaggerated. Apart from a Korean student and an unfriendly neighbor, Larry lives surrounded by his own kind: lawyers, dentists, doctors, colleagues, a too-friendly neighbor. His world is a suburban shtetl on the edge of the prairie.
And the local details are, in the end, incidental. “A Serious Man” is, like its biblical source, a distilled, hyperbolic account of the human condition. The punch line is a little different, but you know the joke. And it’s on you, of course.
“A Serious Man” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has drug use, swearing and the repeated violation of Commandments 3, 5 and 7 to 10.
A SERIOUS MAN
Opens on Friday nationwide.
Written, produced and directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen; director of photography, Roger Deakins; edited by Roderick Jaynes; music by Carter Burwell; production designer, Jess Gonchor; released by Focus Features. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.
WITH: Michael Stuhlbarg (Larry Gopnik), Richard Kind (Uncle Arthur), Fred Melamed (Sy Ableman), Sari Lennick (Judith Gopnik), Adam Arkin (Divorce Lawyer), Aaron Wolff (Danny Gopnik), Jessica McManus (Sarah Gopnik), David Kang (Clive Park) and Fyvush Finkel (Dybbuk?).
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Film
Jewish History, Popcorn Included
FIFTEEN years ago, on my first visit to Jerusalem, my wife and I ran into an older gentleman of her acquaintance. I don’t remember if he was a rabbi or a scholar, but he was, in any case, a serious man, and as we chatted he asked me the usual, somewhat prying questions about my background, my interests, my impressions of Israel and so on. Discovering that I had an Anglo-Saxon surname, a non-Jewish father, no knowledge of Hebrew and some skepticism about both God and Zionism — but that I was nonetheless, according to the laws of Moses, a full-fledged member of the tribe — he gave me a tolerant smile. “Long live the Jewish identity crisis,” he said.
Would another 5,770 years be long enough? In retrospect, his sentiment strikes me as both redundant and reductive. In the modern world, after all, to broach the idea of Jewish identity is to invoke not one crisis but many. Religion or ethnicity? Theology or ethics? Culture or ideology? Brooklyn or Tel Aviv? “Why does a Jew answer a question with a question?” my grandfather — an atheist, a socialist and a righteous man in the best Biblical sense — used to ask. “Why not?” was his version of the punch line to that old joke, but plenty of others would do just as well. Why do you ask? As opposed to what?
More than 60 years after the Nazi genocide and the founding of the state of Israel, more than 40 years after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and a more than a century into the Ashkenazi passage through the North American melting pot, the old puzzles persist, though in some perplexing new forms. In novels, on television and especially, lately, on movie screens, fresh expositions of ancient dilemmas and anxieties quarrel and contend. Nothing is settled.
When Adam Sandler, in Judd Apatow’s “Funny People,” claims to detect a telltale trace of “Judaism” in Seth Rogen’s character, everyone knows what he’s talking about. But then again, what exactly does he mean? Judaism in the sense of “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” or of “Eight Crazy Nights”? Or the deracinated “Happy Gilmore”? Or something else?
Mr. Apatow’s film taps into an easily recognizable strain of Jewish-American male identity, one that nods not only in the direction of comedians ranging from Milton Berle to Lenny Bruce to Larry David, but also at a broader tradition of sexual insecurity and worldly ambition that zigzags from Saul Bellow to Woody Allen by way of Paul Mazursky and Philip Roth.
Meanwhile, a different, if related, set of associations animates “A Serious Man,” the latest movie by Joel and Ethan Coen. That film, which opened on the Friday after Yom Kippur (just in time for the Sukkot box office rush), travels back to suburban Minnesota in 1967 (after a prologue set in a Polish shtetl centuries before) to re-examine themes first laid out in that long, grim Jewish joke known as the Book of Job. The Coens’ protagonist, though not their title character, is Larry Gopnik, a devoted family man, a quiet neighbor and a hard-working professor whose life is turned upside down by a host of torments. The usual stuff: an unfaithful wife, a pothead son, an indifferent universe. If Mr. Sandler’s George Simmons is a recognizable type — the insecure, rebellious, egocentric and libidinous son — Larry Gopnik could be his self-effacing, dutiful brother.
Between “Funny People” and “A Serious Man” (the titles of which could easily be swapped, speaking of identity crises) came Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds,” which dominated the late-summer box office with the spectacle of Jews inflicting righteous payback on their oppressors. Going much further than, say, Edward Zwick’s “Defiance,” which derived its tale of tough Jews fighting back against the Nazis from the historical record, “Basterds” presented one of the most audacious examples of counterfactual history ever committed to film. Not only did Mr. Tarantino posit a band of ultraviolent Hebrew avengers smashing the skulls and slicing off the scalps of German soldiers; he also imagined an act of terroristic mass murder —a fire in a crowded theater — that did not so much avenge the Holocaust as undo it.
Was this good for the Jews? Mr. Tarantino’s philo-Semitism, though unorthodox, also proved surprisingly less controversial than it might have even a few years ago. But now even the Holocaust has become a safe subject for pure entertainment. And there was something seductive in the fantasy figures he put up on screen in lavishly saturated color. The basterds themselves, to be sure, but even more so Shosanna, their unwitting co-conspirator, with her honey-blond hair, her African lover and her fangirl appreciation of cinema. In an Allen movie or a Roth novel, such a woman would have the added, transgressive attraction of being an archetypal shiksa, but in Mr. Tarantino’s looking-glass world of wish fulfillment, she was a Nice Jewish Girl.
In the real world of ethical reasoning, a crime like the Shoah refutes the logic of vengeance, which is the only story Mr. Tarantino knows how to tell. He derives it from westerns and martial arts films, among other sources, but the honor-based personal vendettas that propel those narratives become preposterous in the face of mass killing. Which may be why the machinery of death that has become a fixture (and something of a fetish) in so many Holocaust films has no place in the world of “Inglourious Basterds,” where the murder is retail, specific and individual.
But Mr. Tarantino’s brazen wishing away of genocide — an act of mad generosity and startling egotism — may not be so rare. After decades of sifting through the Jewish past in the interests of commemoration and comprehension, writers and filmmakers have more recently taken up the task of imagining it otherwise. A local variant of magic realism has flourished in Israeli literature for some time, most powerfully in the novels of David Grossman, but in America this impulse has at times taken a speculative, frankly fantastical turn.
What if things had been different? What if, instead of claiming a permanent home in Palestine, the displaced Jews of Europe had settled for a temporary claim on a sliver of Alaska? Or what if, just as Hitler was undertaking his murderous, expansionist policies, an anti-Semitic popular hero had been elected president of the United States and had visited upon America’s Jews a set of policies that combined Jim Crow and the Nuremberg laws?
Those are the conceits of “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” by Michael Chabon, and “The Plot Against America,” by Mr. Roth, novels that are much more than thought experiments tracking an alternative story of the Jews in North America. But such experimentation is nonetheless rampant at a time when the bonds of history seem to have loosened and when the imaginative possibilities, the varieties of available Jewish experience, have expanded at an almost dizzying rate. In Israel, in the diaspora, in every religious denomination and style, in a proliferation of cultural initiatives from hipster Yiddishism to Hebrew hip-hop.
All of which may be the current face of that sturdy old crisis. “Do you take advantage of the new freedoms?” a seductive neighbor — a desperate Jewish housewife — asks Larry Gopnik as she hands him a joint. Larry’s confused, ambivalent response is nothing new. Freedom has never been an entirely comfortable concept for a people whose deity bestowed upon them more than 600 commandments and who have historically feared not only annihilation, but also dissolution.
Emancipation in 18th- and 19th-century Europe turned out to be a mixed blessing, and in America in the 20th century assimilation was both an aspiration and a worry. Pious shopkeepers looked on with pride and dismay as some of their most brilliant and ambitious children made a great show of casting off parental strictures and the fetters of custom and claiming their individualist American birthright.
But then, as the generations progressed, they circled back. Nathan Zuckerman, Mr. Roth’s durable and defiant alter ego, returned to the clannish precincts of his (and Mr. Roth’s) childhood in Newark, much as the Coen brothers have found their way back to St. Louis Park. The past they imagine is also, in its way, a counter-narrative, not only because of its exaggerations, but also because of what is omitted. Neither the Holocaust nor Israel is mentioned in “A Serious Man,” which also limits the American 1960s to marijuana and the Jefferson Airplane, as if Vietnam, the civil rights movement and the urban riots had never happened.
Objectively, and compared with just about any of his ancestors, Larry Gopnik inhabits an earthly paradise, free from persecution, discrimination and want, surrounded (with a few exceptions) by his own kind, and with nothing to worry about but his job, his family and his God. Needless to say, he’s miserable. But his unhappiness makes for a pretty good joke. Why wouldn’t it?1.10.09
Viennale 2009: Opening and Closing Film
La Pivellina by Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel
The opening film of the Viennale 2009 is La Pivellina by Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel. Thus, the Vienna film festival will be opened for the first time in its history with an Austrian production. The film had its much acclaimed international premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Following their documentary Babooska, in which they followed a family of circus artists throughout Italy, La Pivellina is the first feature film by Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel, realized with amateur actors. The center of the story is an abandoned little girl called “La Pivellina,” who is found and taken in by a family of circus artists. La Pivellina is an unsentimental film about moral courage and solidarity on the fringes of society.
The directors and actors will be present at the gala screening of the film on October 22 in Vienna’s Gartenbaukino. In addition to a number of other festival guests, we are also happy to welcome the actress Tilda Swinton, to whom the Viennale dedicates a tribute this year, on the opening evening of the festival. A Serious Man by Ethan and Joel Coen
As closing film of the festival on November 4, the Viennale will present the Austrian premiere of the latest work by the brothers Ethan and Joel Coen, A Serious Man. Cast with largely unknown actors, it ranks among one of the best films by the Coen brothers in years. Set in 1967, in a small town in the American Midwest, A Serious Man is a comedy about a Jewish middle-class family, filmed in the absurd, tragicomical style characteristic of earlier works by the Coen brothers.
Goys, God, dentistry and "A Serious Man" (Salon)
By Andrew O'Hehir
So you want to hear a story? I've got one for you. It's about a beleaguered suburban dad who's got problems in his marriage and goes to see the rabbi -- actually, a whole sequence of rabbis -- with unsatisfactory results. It's got an envelope full of money and a glorious 1964 Coupe de Ville in it, both of which lead to startling and unforeseen consequences. It's got a secret message, possibly or probably from Hashem (aka God), inscribed on the teeth of an oblivious goy. This whole story might indeed be a fable about the way Hashem works in the lives of ordinary people -- or it might be about a dybbuk, a demonic spirit from ancient Jewish folklore. Then again, the fable might just be about the disordered, random operations of fate, and the futile human struggle to understand them.
One thing is for sure: This story, which comes to us in the form of a movie called "A Serious Man," is one of the subtlest, darkest and most deceptive ever spun by Joel and Ethan Coen, its writers, directors and producers. This is by far the most personal and revealing film the Coens have ever made, which might not seem like saying much: They're known for creating mannered, sardonic fictional worlds shaped as much (or more) by film history as by real life. But in recapturing the vanished realm where they grew up -- a self-enclosed world of Midwestern Jewish suburbia -- the Coens have crafted perhaps their most original work, one that presents itself, early on, as middleweight middle-American domestic comedy before revealing a strange and secret power that's closer to magic or myth.
In fact, it isn't true that "A Serious Man" appears to be suburban comedy at first, since it opens with an ambiguous yarn straight out of 1920s Yiddish theater. On a snowy night, in a shtetl somewhere in Eastern Europe, a man and his wife are visited by -- well, who, exactly? Is it a man who recently recovered from a serious illness and was mistakenly reported to be dead? Or has the man really died, and been possessed by a malicious, wandering spirit -- a dybbuk? (Whether dybbuk or human, the visitor is played by legendary Jewish theater actor Fyvush Finkel.)
Only after that are we plunged into suburban Minneapolis in 1967, straight into the ear canal of bored teenager Danny Gopnik (Aaron Wolff), who is listening to Jefferson Airplane on his transistor radio instead of paying attention in Hebrew school. That transgression will be discovered and punished -- Hashem sees everything we do, after all -- and so will the other sins committed by the movie's characters, which range from adultery to accepting bribes to smoking some killer weed in the middle of a weekday afternoon with the hot, semi-abandoned wife next door.
What's the connection between the dybbuk story, set in a vanished world of poor and superstitious villagers, and the far more familiar story of Danny's dad, Larry (the wonderful Michael Stuhlbarg, another New York theater actor), a perennially perplexed college professor who's trying to keep his respectable suburban existence from slipping between his fingers like so much Minnesota lake mud? There are a lot of possible answers: The Coens could be saying, for instance, that modern American Jews still inhabit the same mythological universe their European forebears did; or perhaps that the people in the 1960s story are still paying off the debt incurred by that couple in the Yiddish tale.
But the real answer is that I don't know, and that like "A Serious Man" in general, the Yiddish prologue either clicks with you or it doesn't. Although critics generally love this movie so far, there also seems to be an emerging consensus that it's "too Jewish" and too light on star power to have any chance with a general audience. Maybe that's all true -- there's definitely no Clooney or Pitt in this cast -- but speaking as someone who's about as goyish as you can get while still living in New York City, I found this beautifully crafted movie to be frequently hilarious, consistently surprising and rigged with spring-loaded narrative bombs, from its opening scene to its devastating final shot.
Is Larry Gopnik even the "serious man" of the title? He yearns to be, but his wife, Judith (a pitch-perfect Sari Lennick), reserves that adjective for Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), the pompous, erudite pseudo-bon-vivant for whom she's leaving Larry. Melamed -- one of those guys you've seen in, say, Woody Allen movies but couldn't put a name to -- gives an absolutely priceless performance, but it's tough to pick a favorite in a supporting cast like this. Richard Kind plays Larry's depressive brother Arthur, who haunts the Gopnik family in dybbuk-like fashion, monopolizing the bathroom (to drain his sebaceous cyst) or arriving home at dawn and in handcuffs. Adam Arkin is a pathologically pessimistic divorce lawyer, George Wyner plays the rabbi who tells us the story of the goy's Hashem-inscribed teeth, and Amy Landecker gets one wonderful scene as the blasé-but-smoldering stoner babe next door.
You certainly couldn't say that "A Serious Man" is suffused with Proustian longing for the Jewish suburbia of years gone by -- these are the Coens, after all, and there are plenty of other sources for that kind of thing. But it isn't a ruthless satire, either. I think it's a meticulously pitched black comedy, which is both too slippery to hold in your hands and fundamentally sincere in expressing the Coens' view of their roots and the universe.
Although Joel Coen (the taller one, with longer hair, generally seen in sunglasses) and Ethan Coen have a reputation as being difficult interview subjects, in my few encounters with them I've found them congenial, amusing and completely willing to discuss their films, their methods and their motivations. I think they don't do well with vague or general questions -- when asked at a recent press conference, "What's the best thing about being Jewish?" they declined to answer -- and don't especially relish playing the role of celebrities. Ask them to talk about movies, though, or about the vicissitudes of 1960s television reception, and you're golden. I met them recently in New York, just before the premiere of "A Serious Man."
I was thinking about your last three movies: "No Country for Old Men," "Burn After Reading" and now this one. They're really pitched in different keys, so to speak. Is that deliberate, or did it just come out that way?
Joel Coen: You do pursue that to an extent. The funny thing about those three movies is that the scripts were all done around the same time, and they got made in the particular order that happened for boring production reasons. But when you move on to something else, you're often thinking, "What can we do that's not like what we just did?" Just because that makes it more fun for us.
I'm someone who also lived through the period of American history you capture in this film, and it's incredibly vivid. It seems like one thing you guys really like about making movies is the opportunity to create a world, a place and time that's specific to each film.
Ethan Coen: It is important to us, where and when the story is set. To get a grip on the story, we kind of have to get a grip on its context. Especially in this case, because the context of this one is where and when we grew up. It's interesting you refer to it as American history -- I guess that means we're getting on. But yeah, the whole enterprise of doing a story in the '60s, in suburbia, in this Jewish community -- Midwestern suburbia -- was interesting to us. And part and parcel of thinking about this story was thinking about where it was set.
J.C.: Part of the pleasure of making a movie, of actually putting the movie together, is creating a world that's specific to the movie. When you're doing period movies, that has its own challenges and pleasures, which was pretty much the case here.
You have some shtick in this movie about sending Dad up onto the roof to adjust the TV antenna, in a futile effort to get rid of all that snow on the screen during your favorite show. I can remember that, but I suppose there are now several generations of Americans now who will never have that experience.
J.C.: That's true. Those times are gone -- TV aerials. We actually had to put the aerials up on all those houses. Another interesting problem was that we were looking for a neighborhood -- and you can find them where we were shooting -- where the houses are of that vintage and are still in great shape. The problem is that they're surrounded by old trees that weren't there 30 or 40 years ago. So most or all of the trees were removed digitally, by computer. But in doing that, because they used the roof lines of the houses as matte lines, then they had to put all those aerials back in.
E.C. I want to say we had rabbit ears on our TV, which we didn't use in the movie. I remember dicking around with the rabbit ears, spinning them and moving them around on top of the set.
With aluminum foil on top of the rabbit ears?
We didn't do that. Some people did, but we didn't do that.
You were not low-class enough for aluminum foil on top of the TV set. That's a goy thing. [Laughter.]
You know, we always had a black-and-white TV, even past when our friends got color TV. But I remember that the early color TVs had controls for "Hue," and there was something else, some other quaint, dated term.
I remember that. I can't remember what it was called. You could make it go really green in one direction, and then really, like, this hideous orange-red color in the other. Was that what it was?
Yeah, I guess. You saw some really gruesome color.
Now, the most specific and startling thing about this film's setting, which is definitely not universal, is that it's a Jewish community that looks very generic at first glance, but totally isn't. Most representations of Jewish culture in American movies comes down to two things: immigrant culture, on one hand, or the fully assimilated culture of a Barry Levinson movie, where the people are into Cadillacs and football. This is totally different: middle-class, fully American but not assimilated.
J.C.: That's correct. That's a really good characterization of it, and of how it's different from what you're familiar with: things like a Barry Levinson movie or, like, Bernard Malamud or Saul Bellow novels. Those are also more urban.
E.C.: They're all more urban and except for Saul Bellow, more East Coast.
J.C.: Yeah, he was a Chicagoan, but Chicago is very different from where we grew up. You're right, it's very American but not assimilated. It was a community that existed within the wider culture but was protective and somewhat insular. You felt like your experience -- even though we were aware that most of the people around us were not Jewish, in the city that we lived -- we felt like our experience was in certain ways really bounded by the community.
E.C.: It wasn't just us. It was universal among the Jews in our community. We went to Hebrew school every day after school, Monday through Thursday. We went to shul on Saturday, and Hebrew school again on Sunday morning. It was, you know --
J.C.: We had some form of religious instruction six days a week.
That's impressive. I notice that you don't ever show the kids in the movie in public school, where presumably they are interacting with non-Jews every day. Except for the scary neighbors, and of course the goy with the teeth, there pretty much aren't any non-Jews in the movie.
J.C.: Right. What seemed interesting, as a place to set a story, was that world on the bus coming home from school, and the experience in Hebrew school and the synagogue. To a certain extent, when you're thinking about these things, you're also aware of the things you've seen many, many times and the things you haven't seen at all. The things you haven't seen at all seem like more interesting challenges, more interesting stories.
Some viewers may be taken aback by the way you depict the community's attitude toward non-Jews. There's a lot of dismissive talk about "goys," and the community seems totally self-contained: Jewish doctors, Jewish lawyers, Jewish dentists. I guess it's all summed up at the end of the anecdote the rabbi tells about the "goy's teeth." Which is awesome, by the way. At the end of it, Larry asks the rabbi, "What happened to the goy?" and the rabbi is, like, "The goy? Who cares?"
J.C.: [Laughter.] That always brings the house down.
E.C.: It's a classic line.
J.C.: That's the way, you know, non-Jews were talked about. It wasn't in a dismissive way. It was that, in certain contexts anyway, they were the Other.
E.C.: Right. It wasn't even about slighting them. It was: They have nothing to do with us.
Well, I'm definitely out of my depth with respect to Jewish culture, but the whole story -- the whole movie -- feels to me like a Talmudic parable, a moral fable about what happens to somebody who makes certain choices in his life. Then you've got these other stories nested into it, including a prologue that's in Yiddish and has the feeling of the old Yiddish theater. It uses the old tradition of the dybbuk, a kind of demonic spirit from Jewish folk tradition. I'm sure you don't want to give too much away, but what can you say about the relationship between that story and the main story?
E.C.: Well, it's interesting that you ask about it in connection with your other comment, that the main body of the movie feels like a folk tale or fable. That, I guess, is the ambition -- well, not even the ambition of putting on that beginning story, because there was no clear-cut agenda. It just felt right to us. But I think it felt right for that reason. It felt like a folk tale, so it served implicitly as an introduction, to say, "Here's another folk tale, here's another Jewish story." I guess this is imposing an explanation after the fact, because we don't really think about it in these terms while we're doing it, but, yeah, it's part of the whole Yiddishkeit, part of the whole Jew storytelling thing. Jews are big on stories, you know?
J.C.: Yeah, exactly. At a certain point we were thinking, maybe not explicitly, "What is Jewish storytelling?" This is Jewish storytelling, and this is Jewish storytelling. Are they an echo or a reflection of each other? Can they be? Would that be interesting? "What is a Jewish community?" This is a Jewish community in the shtetl, this is a community in another place. Are they reflections or echoes of each other in some way that's vaguely interesting and feels right, or at least not wrong? Will it be an interesting ambassador for the rest of the movie?
As Ethan was saying, sometimes you impose these things after the fact. But I think there was a little bit of thinking that by doing this we were saying immediately, "This is a story very specifically about Jews." Not a story about the Midwest, which you might have felt for a while if we hadn't done this. We were plunging into the deep end, and saying, "Here you are in a world of Jews, and that's what this movie is going to be about." It's a cliché, but when you see them in the long black coats and the sidelocks, that's putting your face in it. And we thought that was a good thing.
Yeah, I guess that's roughly how I responded to it. I assumed that there was a relationship between that first story and the later story, but not a linear, one-to-one connection, like those people in the shtetl are the grandparents of those later people or something. It does pose a question right away: What's the relationship between this village in Poland or wherever the hell it is, and this suburban neighborhood in Minneapolis?
E.C.: Another thing that appealed to us about it was that first you see Jews where you're used to seeing them, in the shtetl -- and then you see Jews on the plains. That's odd!
Let's talk about the story of the goy's teeth. So some non-Jew goes to see a Jewish dentist, who discovers that he's got a coded message from God written on the inside of his lower front teeth in biblical Hebrew. Did you make this up from whole cloth, or does it have some basis in folklore or something?
E.C.: It's got a basis in fact. It's something that happened to me a few years ago. I don't really like to talk about it. [Laughter.] No, we just made it up. The whole Jewish storytelling thing: You go to the rabbi with a problem, and he tells you a story. So what's the story going to be?
J.C.: The only thing we had trouble with was coming up with a Hebrew expression or word that was exactly seven characters that meant "Help me." For that we went to a rabbi named Daniel Sklar, who suggested something.
E.C. It was good. He said, "It's kind of 'help me,' kind of 'save me,' kind of 'redeem me.' And we thought, OK, that's perfect. Those are all good tones.
This is your most overtly Jewish movie, by a long shot. But I was able to come up with a brief list of other Jewish characters in your films. John Goodman's immortal Jewish convert in "The Big Lebowski," of course, who announces that he doesn't fucking roll on Shabbos. And I think we can assume that Barton Fink is Jewish.
E.C. We assumed that too.
J.C.: Well, he's Jewish and the Michael Lerner character in that movie is Jewish. The studio head. Some people kind of objected to that at the time, absurdly.
E.C.: We made a studio head Jewish! Imagine that!
"A Serious Man" opens Oct. 2 in New York, Los Angeles and Minneapolis, with wider national release to follow.
12.9.09
Toronto Film Festival 2009: Día 2
A SERIOUS MAN, de Joel y Ethan Coen (8) ¿Llorar en una película de los Coen? ¿En serio? Me agarraron. Tal vez sea porque esta historia de una familia judía que vive en un pequeño pueblo en los años 60 me toca más de cerca de lo que suponía, pero lo cierto es que me emocioné mucho en algunos momentos del filme. Claro que los Coen, siendo como son, apenas nos ven sensibles, nos tiran un mazazo de crueldad como para no olvidarnos en qué mundo estamos. Pero esta vez, acaso por lo personal y autobiográfico de la historia, la maldad queda para algunos secundarios, mientras que el personaje principal (un pariente, en más de un sentido, de Barton Fink) es uno de los sujetos más queribles desde Lebowski. Aunque, claro, muchiiiisimo más sufrido. Esto es una sobredosis de judaísmo, se los digo: más que Woody Allen y Philip Roth juntos... (Más detalles aquí)
THE HOLE 3D, de Joe Dante (6). Como su colega Sam Raimi pero por motivos seguramente muy distintos (Dante no viene de exitazo tras exitazo como Mr. Spiderman), el director de "Gremlins" vuelve a una película que parece de los '80, solo que en 3D. Una historia de módico terror, con adolescentes que descubren el famoso "pozo sin fondo" en el subsuelo de su casa, tiene el agregado no del todo necesario del 3D (sí, para el pozo, pero no mucho más). Es cierto que nos quejamos cuando el 3D está usado de manera efectista, pero cuando se usa discretamente, como aquí, la pregunta: ¿y porqué no hacerla de manera normal y evitarnos estos molestos anteojos? Una película chiquita, sencilla, que no asustará a ningún espectador de más de 12 años.
IRENE, de Alain Cavalier (9) Hasta ahora no había podido recuperar casi nada de Cannes, pero logré meterme en una función de público de esta hermosa película de Cavalier y fue lo mejor que hice en el día. Chiquita, delicada, transparente, dolorosa, divertida por momentos, esta búsqueda/retrato/diario/exploración de Cavalier acerca de su mujer Irene, que murió en los años '70 en un accidente de tránsito, es una prueba clara de que la cámara tiene la capacidad (como en otros filmes de Varda o Marker) de transformarse en un acompañante de nuestros registros, nuestros miedos, nuestras dudas y nuestras emociones cotidianas.
UP IN THE AIR, de Jason Reitman (8) Como esto va a salir en el diario del domingo, me reservo la opinión hasta entonces. Pero bien, muy bien. Clooney está mejor que nunca y Reitman es el nuevo Billy Wilder. Como "Jerry Maguire", pero más potente y menos condescendiente. Se va a hablar mucho de esta peli...
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