ALTHOUGH THE COEN BROTHERS' new film A Serious Man isn't a part of the Walker's Coen Brothers retrospective, the retrospective has been organized to play concurrent to the film's opening, and the Walker hosted a cast-only screening of the film last week, as well as hosting a talk with the Coen Brothers; it's as though this new film is an unofficial part of the festival, and I shall treat it as such.
The film is set in the Jewish community of St. Louis Park in the late Sixties. I became part of that community in the early Seventies, but it isn't really my St. Louis Park that the Coen brothers are recreating, although there are hints of it. Their protagonist, a bespectacled and milquetoast college professor named Larry Gopnik, lives on Fern Hill Lane; I went to grade school at Fern Hill. The film makes protracted use of the name of local lawyer Ron Meshbesher, whose commercials I grew up watching. and whose name actually drew applause from the opening night audience at the Uptown. At one point in the film, a character briefly stops in a Red Owl grocery store, and it is perfectly recreated. Gopnik's son spends all of his afternoons at Hebrew school and listens to records at home of his haftarah portion -- I did the same, although my portion was on audio cassette. At one point in the film, Gopnik takes his brother, a hulking wreck of a man played by Richard Kind, to swim in a lake, possibly Lake of the Isles; the beach looked familiar, and I am sure it is one that I went to many time when I was a boy.
But the Coen brothers' St. Louis Park is a treeless Jewish enclave of ranch houses; my neighborhood, a block from Fern Hill, was a lush, Elm-lined street with a surprising variety of house styles -- the one I grew up in, as an example, was a vine-covered reddish-brown brick structure. It didn't look like a prototypical 60s suburban home, which was what the Coens were going for, but it did look like St. Louis Park. I lived a block down from the local Orthodox synagogue, and so every Saturday would watch a parade of Orthodox Jews walking to shul and then back again; these Jews do not appear in the film. Gopnik's lone gentile neighbor is a strange, stern man with a buzz cut and hunting rifles who endlessly plays catch with his son in their back yard, and who is treated suspiciously by the film's Jewish character (appearing as the central antagonist in a dream about anitsemitism at one point). One of non-Jewish neighbors was in medicine, if I remember, and he had two sons, one of whom was a thoughtful boy who liked Spike Jones records and Dungeons and Dragons, and was my friend; the other son was very young and, in retrospect, was probably autistic.
In other words, the St. Louis Park of my childhood was full of people, rather than stereotypes. The Coen Brothers are terrific writers, and have a talent for humanizing their characters, but their style of comedy often starts out with cliches, stereotypes, and stock characters. So don't believe the critics who say that this film is the Coen brothers' most autobiographical; it isn't. It's an angsty and blackly comic Jewish narrative, the sort that novelest Philip Roth specialized in, relocated to the Midwest and placed in an pastiche of Sixties suburbs that happens to share its name with St. Louis Park. It tales place, as do all of the Coen brothers' films, in a Coen brothers world, and central to it is their mocking portrayal of ethnicity, which I have never been comfortable with.
They've taken broad aim at the Jews before, perhaps feeling okay with this sort of broadness because they are Jewish. As an example, in Miller's Crossing, John Turturro's Jewish con artist was a wheedling, corrupt, sinister, perverted creature with greasy hair and a hook nose that seemed drawn directly from antisemitic literature, but perhaps he can be given a pass because this is a film where everybody is a sort of comic version of ethnic stereotypes, with the Irish being brawling drunkards who support boss politicking and the Italians being ignorant, just-off-the-boat criminal psychopaths. The Coens also created Barton Fink, again played by Turturro: This character is an anvil-haired and bespectacled intellectual who was defined by his pomposity, while the Hollywood studio boss he works for is a blustering, craven, shallow blowhard who refers to himself, and other Jews, using racial epithets; both are stock Jewish characters. In the Coen brothers world, Jewish characters are not merely funny for their individual idiosyncrasies, but there is also something about their Jewishness that is funny.
There's nothing inherently wrong with this. The Coen brothers, if they are anything, are filmmakers who draw repeatedly from the wells of irony, and so characters will often be bracketed in quotes -- think of the gang of thieves in the brothers' remake of The Ladykillers. Tzi Ma's characters, The General, might as well just be a cartoon of an Asian, but, then, the film's football player, Lump, is presented as being so stupid that even stuttering out a simple sentence is work for him. Characters often verge on caricature in the Coens' films, and those caricatures are often racial or ethnic.
This is risky, because sometimes the bracketed quotation marks around a character don't hold, and you just end up with a cruel racial stereotype. The Coens have fumbled at it before, especially in their use of black characters, who more often than not are just background color, if you will, for a scene, where they just hang around, being black. (The gravediggers in O Brother, Where Art Thou, are an example: They are only on hand to belt out a somber gospel song. The Coens have made extensive use of the magical negro trope, seemingly obliviously: The narrator of The Hudsucker Proxy isn't a satire of ancient black characters who speak in an unexpectedly omniscient dialect and occasionally offer up magical assistance to the film's characters -- that's just who he is. The same thing is true of the handcar-pushing blind seer in O Brother. They're not satires of black stereotypes; they're just black stereotypes.
So what to make of this Jewish enclave that the Coens have created in A Serious Man? And what to make of the fact that the film presents itself as the most of Jewish of narratives -- a sort of a retelling of the tale of Job, but, more than that, a retelling of Rabbi Harold Kushner's book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, which was quite popular in Jewish schools in the Eighties, and addresses he question of why God would let us suffer when He is supposed to love us, and why God sometimes rains troubles down on the heads of decent people while allowing the wicked to prosper.
It's tricky to say, and how much you enjoy the film is going to depend on how much you enjoy the Coen brothers sense of humor, which is blacker and bleaker and more rooted in discomfort here than has ever been previously. The film is a sort of a Jewish fable as told by atheists: Troubles befall Gopnik, many of them unexpected and humiliating, and he seeks solace in religion, which gives him none. He visits three rabbis, and they are, in turn, ineffectual, bewildering, and unavailable. Gopnik has done nothing to invite the tsuris that comes to him, but he hasn't done much to keep it away either -- Gopnik is the most passive of the Coen brothers' protagonists, meekly receiving whatever God, or the universe, or whoever, throws at him. It's a strange narrative decision, as usually the protagonist in a film is somehow responsible for the events of his life -- they are the main character in their story. But that's not the case here. The main character in A Serious Man is trouble, and trouble gets the final word in two closing scenes that are as audacious and disturbing as anything ever put onscreen, and then the film ends abruptly, without answering any of the questions the film asks.
And that's why this film seems atheistic. Despite direct evidence of the supernatural in the film, there is no God in this universe. Because the events of the film have no explanation, and never will. They aren't the actions of destiny, they are punishments meted out by the Coen brothers, and Gopnik is punished for nothing more than being a character in a Coen brothers film. Rabbis have no solace, or explanations, or anything to offer, because they are not rabbis, but comic characters -- the most elongated scene in the film, the second rabbi's fable of "The Goy's Teeth," primarily reads as the closing dialogue of Burn After Reading rewritten as a Jewish folk tale. The point is the same:
CIA Superior: What did we learn, Palmer?
CIA Officer: I don't know, sir.
CIA Superior: I don't fuckin' know either. I guess we learned not to do it again.
CIA Officer: Yes, sir.
CIA Superior: I'm fucked if I know what we did.
CIA Officer: Yes, sir, it's, uh, hard to say
CIA Superior: Jesus Fucking Christ.
Although, in Burn After Reading, there is an explanation for the events: paranoia, greed, vanity, and, most of all, miscommunication. There is none that here. Gopnik is just a shlub, and I suppose your pleasure in the film is going, to an extent, be based on how entertaining you find it to watch him tortured. I found it bullying, as though the actual point of the film was to needlessly brutalize a character. You might read something else into it. The Coens cloak their film in ambiguity, refusing to explain what anything means, and that sort of ambiguity leads to multiple potential explanations. I'm not sure there is any correct one though; I suspect the ambiguity might be covering for the fact that the Coens don't really know what they want to say with this film, but just sort of got caught up in the details of telling it, taking perverse pleasure in having their main character pawed by the man who has cuckolded him, and bled dry by lawyers, and wrung out by a family of cryptic Asians (another stereotype, used here almost solely for the purpose of linguistic tomfoolery, with the characters talking like fortune cookies.)
With its ambiguous plotting, what we're left with is a portrait of a Jewish family, and, to an extent, of a Jewish community, and what the Coen brothers give us is clannishness, ineffectualness, incomprehensible intellectualism, and emasculinity; we get jokes about nose jobs and lawyers. The Jews in the film look like they were sent from Central Casting -- they are generally myopic and big nosed, with olive skin and shiny, curly hair, if they aren't flagrantly bald. Many of them are grotesque. And, again, that's quite different from the St. Louis Park I grew up in, where my neighbors across the street were red-headed Jews with small, attractive features, and my best friend was a blond Jew; and then there was me, with blue eyes and Irish features, thanks to adoption. When I was growing up, Jews had stopped exclusively looking like the stereotype of Jews, if they ever did, but those aren't the Jews the Coens wanted for this film. Of course, there are Jews who do look like that -- most of the castmembers of A Serious Man are actually Jewish -- but there wasn't the uniformity of appearance that the Coens use in this film. And, in the late 60s, when the film was set, there wasn't the neatness and formality of costuming that is on display here. I can say this with some authority, as my father was a professor at the University of Minnesota, and so I grew up around Jewish academics, who, more often than not, resembled Allen Ginsberg. But the Coens place Gopnik in an uncomfortable-looking suit and military issue-syle glasses, Brylcreem back his hair, and direct the actor to go through the film with a series of pained facial expressions, as though his only lot in life is discomfort.
I don't know that this is a complaint so much as it is a note: That there are a lot of places where A Serious Man diverges from history, and it all seems to be at the service of showing its main character as a pained, ineffectual, comical other, a sad sack punching bag from a clannish and strange-looking and incomprehensible tribe. The whole thing plays like a Jewish joke, but it's hard to get away from the feeling that the joke is on the Jews, and that might be okay -- after all, Jews aren't above being teased, even if that teasing toys with some hurtful stereotypes, as long as that teasing has purpose. What troubles me is I don't know the purpose here, except, perhaps, to bully, and the Coen brothers refuse to explain themselves.
More Bits and Pieces: The Walker Art Center Project
0 Response to "BITS AND PIECES: THE WALKER ART CENTER PROJECT | A SERIOUS MAN"