Film
What's on at the cinema plus reviews of the latest movie and DVD releases
Bookmark this pageA Serious Man (2009)
Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Movie review
From Time Out London
Towards the end of the Coen brothers’ ‘The Big Lebowski’, a black-clad German complains that a situation isn’t fair. ‘Fair?’ splutters Walter Sobchak (John Goodman). ‘Who’s the fucking nihilist around here?!’ Life isn’t fair for the lead of the Coens’ latest, ‘A Serious Man’, either: Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a mild-mannered mathematics professor in 1967 suburban Jewish Minnesota, is struggling with a crumbling marriage, alienated kids, a burdensome brother, malicious professional rumours, a siren neighbour and incessant calls from a mail-order record company. Unlike the nihilists, however, Larry has faith: he is a conscientious Jew and tries to be a serious man. So, to quote a Jefferson Airplane song from the film’s soundtrack, when the truth is found to be lies and all the hope within you dies… Then what?Glanced at in many of the Coens’ earlier films, Jewishness is front and centre here, from the shtetl-set, Yiddish-speaking prologue to the hermetically Jewish community in which Larry lives. Drawing on the actual milieu of their own adolescence, the filmmakers – past masters of outré production design and sardonic genre subversion – play things relatively straight to tell a story that, for all its plentiful absurdities, is sincerely engaged with the challenge of unjust suffering. Bewildered, desperate, nose twitching in perplexity, Stuhlbarg’s Larry has been compared to Job; understandably, given his host of burdens and the setting’s Old Testament overtones. Yet Larry is perhaps closer to Kafka’s Josef K, another put-upon character who suffers an unwarranted ordeal without quite being heroic.
The Coens nod at some familiar stylistic tropes – florid swearing, sexual euphemism, crusty, aged characters – but the film’s potency is rooted in quiet precision and detailed realisation. Roger Deakins’s typically polished photography gives an oppressively hard edge to Midwestern suburbia while the sound design is a wondrous melange of soup-slurping, hacking coughs, gastric juices and ominous clanging. Stuhlbarg, a Tony-winning stage actor, leads a largely unknown but impeccable cast that also includes Sari Lennick as Larry’s no-nonsense wife, Fred Melamed as her smug, unctuous lover and Richard Kind as Larry’s sad-sack brother, forever draining a cyst on his neck.
Established religion offers Larry little consolation but the idea of faith, or at least good living, that emerges from his struggle matches the sensibility the Coens have unobtrusively espoused throughout their work: reject worldly status, bear trials with humility, find joy in fellow-feeling. Bad things happen to good people. To acknowledge – even, as storytellers, to embrace – this fact is not to indulge in nihilism, but to make more urgent the social task that might mitigate its effects. You better find somebody to love.
Author: Ben Walters
Time Out London Issue 2048: 19-25 November, 2009
User reviews of this film
-
- villlardi said...
- Posted on Feb 08 2010 20:44 uncomfortably sleepy...
- Report as inappropriate
-
- villardi said...
- Posted on Feb 08 2010 15:26 at the risk of getting hollered at again, Marilyn I'm with you. I don't think people are unintelligent, but this film definitely makes some people very uncomfortable.
- Report as inappropriate
-
- marilyn said...
- Posted on Feb 08 2010 14:52 The painfully limited intelligence of all the reviewers who hated this film is a real worry. They really should stick to good old lowest common denominator blockbusters and leave the intelligent films to the intelligent veiwers.
- Report as inappropriate
-
- Riley said...
- Posted on Feb 08 2010 11:50 I went and saw this film when it came out and thought it was boring as hell. Today, the person I went to see it with suggested going to see it again. Not because it was that good, but because they 'd forgotten that they'd seen it already. Enough said. WAAAAAY overrated. Yawn.
- Report as inappropriate
-
- Mon said...
- Posted on Jan 18 2010 22:51 This movie is so so so boring.... i try to keep my eyes open and to the end - I was like What? i just wasted 2 hours watching the dump movie..
- Report as inappropriate
-
- Tomasz said...
-
Posted on Jan 18 2010 12:12
Making a movie based on the Schrödinger's Cat Paradox theory is a pretty tricky business... Had it been made by any other director - it wouldn't have had any attention (nor good reviews) at all. It would have been doomed, ridiculed, called boring and hopeless. No matter how good the acting, scenography, photos and on and on and on...
Let's face it - this is a BORING movie. Yes, it is highly intelligent, well acted but it is DULL as hell.
Being a massive Coens fan I really think they pushed it too far this time, a film should be (first of all) interesting... A smart theory is not a good reason to make a 2 hr long picture. Let's take a step back, get over this all, recent ‘Coen's craze’ and look at that movie again... What are we presented with? 2 hours of pure dullness.
Regards. - Report as inappropriate
-
- London7 said...
-
Posted on Jan 15 2010 19:37
I read the mixed review and decided to and see it myself! I enjoyed the last work of the Coen's so why not! I have to say it grab my attention from begingin till the end. I didn't see anyone leaving the cinema nor fallen asleep and started snoring. many of us burst out laughing through out the movie and I really enjoyed the movie. I am not jewish nor european still I understood more then I thought I would and found it funny. It was a feel good movie for the New Year.
Maybe my life isn't that bad after all..... - Report as inappropriate
-
- Jeremykyle said...
- Posted on Jan 11 2010 18:50 This film may well have a perfectly valid and intelligent point to make. However it should never have been made into a movie. This film is an interesting anecdote that could be told in a few minutes. I don't know who thought it needed to beade into a 2 hour long film but that person was clearly mentally I'll. No matter what anyone says this film is terminally boring. Anyone who denies this is simply lying. I'm not saying it wasn't well acted and I'm not saying it was pointless but I am saying it was boring; criminally so. And at the end of the day you have to make sure a film doesn't bore it's viewers. That's why this film gets 1 star. If I could give it minus stars then I would. No matter how intelligently conceived a film is, if it's this boring then it has failed.
- Report as inappropriate
-
- puffbother said...
- Posted on Jan 08 2010 21:22 Ricky so true lol lol lol
- Report as inappropriate
-
- zulu said...
- Posted on Jan 08 2010 18:57 Pathetic, don`t waste a dime on this film
- Report as inappropriate
-
- puffbother said...
- Posted on Dec 31 2009 22:34 Cohen brothers uggh I cannot stand their overrated films.
- Report as inappropriate
-
- E A Dobson said...
- Posted on Dec 29 2009 17:58 I think i`ll just wait for the dvd,i thought No country for old men was over rated anyway.
- Report as inappropriate
-
- halfstar said...
- Posted on Dec 28 2009 18:26 this movie should get half a star.
- Report as inappropriate
-
- villardi said...
- Posted on Dec 24 2009 00:13 Oh Ricky Ricky, you better go and see 2012 or the Chipmunks!
- Report as inappropriate
-
- Ricky said...
- Posted on Dec 23 2009 20:29 @ E A Dobson: I'd say, bring a book. Or better yet, a pillow, you're going to need it.
- Report as inappropriate
Now showing
This film is showing at these cinemas
Cast & crew
Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Cast: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Simon Helberg, Adam Arkin full cast
Genre(s): Comedy
Duration: 106 mins
UK Release: Nov 20 2009
US Release: Oct 2 2009
Most popular on this site
Top Stories
Time Out's 50 greatest monster movies
As Joe Johnston’s long-awaited reinvention of Universal’s howl-at-the-moon classic ‘The Wolfman’ hits cinemas, Time Out lists our 50 favourite cinematic stalkers, growlers, slashers and biters.
Mark Kermode: A life in film
Dave Calhoun chats to Britain's most outspoken film critic and pundit ahead of the release of his memoirs
Has Ricky Gervais gone all serious?
The trailer to 'Cemetery Junction' suggests that its writer-director is suppressing his funny bone.
The genius of Roman Polanski
Ahead of his new film, 'The Ghost', we must forget the media circus and remember the artist pleads Wally Hammond
Oscars 2010: The nominees
Tom Huddleston offers his acute analysis on the list of nominees for the 2010 Academy Awards
Rotterdam 2010: Geoff Andrew's report
Geoff Andrew finds rich leftfield pickings at the 2010 Rotterdam Film Festival
Can Tom Ford cut it as a director?
After ten years as creative head of Gucci, Tom Ford has directed his first movie. Nina Caplan meets him
Time Out's 101 Films of the Decade
So here it is… Ten years, thousands of movies and millions of dollars in international box office, and it all boils down to this.
2009: The year in film
We look back at the best movies of 2009 and pick out some of our favourite lists, features and interviews.
What do you think?
Post your review now