As much as Larry Gopnik struggles to be a mensch (a serious man, guided by right principles) he’s constantly fed with temptations and mysterious bad events. He tries his best to keep the family together and live straight, but there’s no end to his tribulations.
Larry is a professor of physics waiting to get promoted to tenured position but the school is getting anonymous letters slandering about him. One of his students doesn’t know basic math and tries to bribe him for a C. Instead of studying for the upcoming bar mitzvah, his son stole money to buy marijuana and is caught listening to the Jefferson Airplane during the Yiddish lesson. His daughter only cares about hairdo and also steals money to get a nose job. His brother is a parasite gambler who sleeps on the family sofa and spends most of his time in the toilet writing numbers on a book. His wife just announced – out of the blue – that she wants a divorce because she is now in a relation with a friend of them, the slimy Sy, considered a serious man by the local Jewish community. The guy living next door tries to steal part of the lawn moving the border. The attractive lady next door offers him marijuana and opportunity for easy sex.
In growing desperation, tormented by horrific nightmares, Larry seeks help from 3 lawyers and 3 rabbis, but none of them actually can or want to do anything useful. They basically don’t care or – worse – they tell him non-sense stories about messages coming from God. At the end of the movie, almost bankrupt, Larry eventually gives up and grants a C to the briber. Soon after that he gets a call from the doctor: they need to talk immediately about something probably bad, perhaps a cancer? And that is nothing, because all of a sudden a tornado is going to hit the school in a few minutes, destroying everything, including the American flag.
Unlike previous movies, this time the Cohen brothers decided to talk about their own culture, their heritage, the place in the mid-west where they grew up. And the Jewish culture in this movie is uneasy, or should I say frightening? Nobody will help you understand the will and the wrath of HaShem (=God), not even the Kabbalah, and the more you keep straight the more you will receive tribulations that you’ll have to swallow. There is no escape. If you get on the rooftop you feel safe for a moment and perhaps you believe you eventually found some insight of what is going on around you, but that’s just one more challenge that’s coming. There are smiles and laughs here and there but most of the movie you feel uneasy about what happens to Larry.
I’m certainly no expert in the Jewish matters as I ignore most of their culture and traditions, but the impression I get from this movie is about a crisis in their religion, struggling to keep up with modern times. In ancient Poland living straight was so simple, even when you had to confront with dybbuks (=evil ghosts) you immediately knew how to deal with them. Nowadays staying in touch with HaShem is increasingly difficult.
On the other hand, the resignation that guides Larry as he tries to take on his shoulder and accept all the bad things happening around him, as if they were something sent by God to atone the original sin, reminds me the lack of reaction in the Jewish people while nazis were progressively segregating them, taking possession of their property (just like the guy next door does with the lawn), up to the concentration camps.
Special mention to the first rabbi, interpreted by Simon Helberg, who is Wolowitz in The Big Bang Theory.
A serious man
USA 2009, by Ethan and Joel Cohen, Drama
IMDB 1019452
