Serious man

Unless they are silent movies, foreign-language films cannot be appreciated if they lack subtitles. Even more difficult to understand are English-language films created by ethnic minorities. Then there is the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man. This is a movie unlike any other. Deliberately so, it would appear.

This is a Jewish mystery movie. I would not be surprised to learn that most Jewish viewers also remain very mystified at the end. The ending is itself such an amazing multi-dimensional cliff-hanger that it is possibly an elaborate in-joke in which the Coens pretended to themselves that they creating a franchise.

The beginning of the movie is a four-minute warning of funny-peculiarity. Fortunately, there are various funny-haha scenes in between the end and the beginning. Some of them will be dissected avidly as classic blackly comic set-pieces by future generations of Jewish-American Film students. The tale of the goy's inscribed teeth is just one glorious non-sequitor blooming in an exquisitely-manicured script.

There was happy-go-lucky mayhem in their previous star-studded dark-black comedy, the wildly whimsical Burn After Reading. With this movie, the Coens have floated way out of their version of mainstream movie-making into a stagnant cul-de-sac in 1967. Lacking any star names, A Serious Man is set prosaically in an American prairie's suburban estate where Jewish-American families try to establish a New World community for themselves and their carefully-cherished tribal heritage.

The seemingly irrelevant prologue shows us an Old World of Jewish-Polish fears and ethnic terminology. The New World of the anti-hero, a dedicated schoolteacher of Math, is shown as not being too different. What can go wrong with his life, will. The reasons why, and any reason why God wishes that fate on him, cannot be answered by his three despicable rabbis, the youngest of whom sees God's purpose in a parking lot. Every Jewish-American character in the rambling-cum-cascading scenario of disasters is despicable. So are the goys, and a couple of sharply-etched Korean-American immigrants, in this prairie fable.

I'd mused recently whether Hollywood ever permits the representation of despicable Jewish characters, and this movie might suggest otherwise. Until the producers' credits roll by and it's revealed that Hollywood didn't bankroll the Academy Award-winning Coens' latest little masterpiece. Credits go to the UK's Working Title Films, swallowed up and wisely left to go its own way by Universal. More British kudos : cinematographer Roger Deakins continues to give the Coens a very personal sense of colour and shadow.

The Coens' anti-hero (Broadway actor Michael Stuhlbarg), possibly a pained family- or self-portrait, is a humble striver lacking the strident self-awareness of a typical Jewish-American comic figure a la Woody Allen, Adam Sandler, Eugene Levy or Larry David. He wants to be a real mensch, a serious man, trying to find a reason, any reason for being alive. Although he's a pathetic loser, lousy parent, cuckolded husband, he's the least despicable person in the movie. He's likeably lack-lustre.

"No Jews were harmed during the making of this picture", the Coens advise in small print, near the end of the credits, just after the customary Humane Society platitude about animals. It doesn't look or feel like a joke that Mel Brooks might have made. In this movie, the Coens were probably trying to say something, more likely a lot of things, about the business of being Jews in the American boondocks. In 1967, it was clearly much harder than being Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld et al in New York at any time in American history.