11-05-09 Movie Review: A Serious Man

Not a whole lot going on in terms of noncommericail movies, but we have the usual Blank Page movie and a new short series in the Murdock, sponsored by Wichita Film Festivals. The Murdock series on Fridays is made up of Akira Kurosawa samurai movies and westerns based on them., plus one Kurosawa's Yojimbo, to be followed by the Italian Sergio Leone's remake that made Clint Eastwood an international star on Friday of next week. That's Yojimbo, with Toshiro Mifune, Friday at 7:30 in the Murdock Theatre, 536 North Broadway. And Sunday, the Blank Page gallery shows Breaking Away, the 1979 hit about bicycle racing, with Dennis Quaid and Jackie Earle Haley and an Oscar-winning screenplay, 7:30 Sunday at the Blank Page, 917 West Douglas.

And commercially, we have another uncontroversial effort by Joel and Ethan Coen, A Serious Man. And as usual, there is controversy about a Coen movie, with Entertainment Weekly giving it an A-rating, the Eagle's Rod Pocowatchit giving it two and a half stars, and me giving it maybe two, or a C. It is perhaps the only Coen brothers movie I would not care to sit through again.

A Serious Man is of the school of comedy that bases itself on such an unremitting succession of calamities that you have to either laugh or cry, and it's hard to enjoy that for a whole feature movie; Anne Hall made it, and Tobacco Road, but in both cases, the disasters were caused largely by the inadequacies of the protagonists, and in A Serious Man, the worst you can say about Michael Stuhlbarg character is that he is rather dull doormat. The most successful misfortune comedies are shorts like Laurel and Hardy's Music Box, comic strips like Peanuts, or acts like famous-sad faced clown Emmett Kelly, maybe also "Get No Respect" Rodney Dangerfield. A Serious Man is more realistic than any of these, and the consequences to Stuhlbarg are more serious than most of them involve.

I readily admit that my sense of humor does not match that of many moviegoers, and I as usual went to a showing that I expected to draw almost no viewers, so I can't say whether A Serious Man is funny. It is also more Jewish than anything since earlier Woody Allen, and I probably don't catch a lot of the ethnic humor; I certainly didn't know what some of the words refer to. But the characters, while individually distinct and well played, were not comic stereotypes so much as universal self-righteous people who were utterly unable to consider the effects of things they said and did on other people; I thought the office bearer of bad news was one of those unconscious sadists, but in the end I was left with doubts, about the only case where a character left me wondering. The son was distasteful like the one in the comic strip Zits, and the daughter was a screaming whiner as well as a thief; the wife never made clear what she say in her lover that was better than her husband, and so it went throughout the whole cast: nobody was doing anything sympathetic or showing anything attractive.

And maybe I just wasn't attentive, but the first part of A Serious Man was such a confusing parade of snippets and fragments that at one point I had Stuhlbarg confused with his adolescent son and didn't know whose story was being told. The best sequence in the whole move was the prologue, and it was never referred to again.

But there are some dandy jabs at rabbis and lawyers who have no help to offer people who claim to be 100% reasonable but who show no heart, and, I'm afraid doormats like Stuhlbarg that we are maybe supposed to sympathize with. A Serious Man is never dull. But I don't get the point, and I didn't laugh.