Hit and mitzvah

“Ahh...can’t we go back to talking about the burgers?”

Ethan Coen’s face suddenly takes on a look of cosmic disappointment, and the 52-year-old filmmaker slumps on the couch in his Toronto hotel suite. His brother Joel, 54, looks just as dour. Minutes before, the Coen brothers were animated, engaged, positively beaming, grilling me about New York’s best burgers. Joel swears by the beef at the Fairway Caf, near his uptown apartment; Ethan praises the lunchtime burgers at Peter Luger’s, which he’s convinced are made from the previous evening’s steaks. “Frannie really likes the ones at Shake Shack,” the older Coen says. (Frannie being the actor Frances McDormand, Joel’s frequent collaborator and wife of 25 years.)

But when the conversation turns to their new seriocomedy, A Serious Man, the brothers clam up. Doing press isn’t the filmmakers’ favorite pastime: “Accept the mystery,” suggests a character to the movie’s Job-like everyschlemiel Larry Gopnik (played by Tony nominee Michael Stuhlbarg), and you get the feeling that the Coens wish journalists would do just that. Still, as this funny, existentialist exploration of faith takes place in Minnesota’s Jewish community during the late ’60s—the exact same era and environment where the siblings spent their own formative years—there’s the hope that the famously private brothers might be more open than usual. Surely, this is a more personal film, even if this oddball peek at their heritage is just as ambiguous, ambitious and layered as similar works (specifically, 1991’s Barton Fink)?

“It is very informed by our experiences growing up, certainly,” Ethan admits. “Though some people have speculated that it’s autobiographical, since our father and Larry are both academics. [Their dad, Edward Coen, was a professor at the University of Minnesota.] But the film is less about our family than what was going on around us as kids.”

Joel nods and joins in: “We were writing the scripts for No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading and this all at the same time, so it wasn’t like we thought, Let’s just look at our past and forget about everything else. But it’s a totally different experience being raised Jewish in the Midwest; the community has its own unique characteristics and flavor, which was something Ethan and I thought would be interesting to revisit.” Ethan adds his two cents: “There’s a big difference between 'prairie’ Jews and coastal Jews. Though no matter where you were at the time, there was always the one kid listening to Jefferson Airplane in Hebrew school.”

That blending of period-specific details—“Somebody to Love” figures prominently in the film, as does F Troop and copious references to the Columbia House Record Club—and a host of traditional cultural signifiers from bar mitzvahs to dybbuks does give A Serious Man a dual sense of authenticity, nailing a certain subethnic experience at a certain moment with panache. Yet while Larry circumnavigates kvetching oddballs like Richard Kind’s avuncular gambling addict and Fred Melamed’s touchy-feely Sy Ableman, there’s precious little of the “Coen-descension” that they’ve been accused of in the past. These vintage Minnesotans may be borderline outrageous, but they definitely stop short of caricature. “We certainly think we treated everybody affectionately here,” Joel says. “I don’t know if others would agree. If anything, we were less kind to the landscape: Our one direction to [cinematographer] Roger Deakins was 'Make it look bleak.’ We didn’t want a warm, fuzzy nostalgia. No Spielberg versions of suburbia, please. But this is where we came from; these are our people.”

As for whether such an idiosyncratic look at Judaism, fate and the price of being morally concerned in a fakakta world will resonate with a larger audience, the Oscar winners can only shrug. “Maybe it’ll become a cult film...” Ethan says, and Joel finishes the thought: “...and then they’ll start holding conventions.”

“'Gopnikfest’ has a nice ring to it, I think,” his brother muses.

“They could have them in Vegas, Los Angeles and Tel Aviv...” Joel continues.

“...and you’d drink Manischewitz every time a character says 'Meshbesher,’” Ethan adds, referring to the film’s oft-mentioned unseen lawyer. Then he fixes the reporter with a look that could be characterized as, well, deadly serious. “So, where was that downtown burger place again?”

A Serious Man opens Fri 2.

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