profoundly moving

Quite possibly my favourite film of the year so far, A Serious Man is in cinemas everywhere from tomorrow (and by ‘tomorrow’ I obviously mean ‘five days ago’. It would have been tomorrow had I got round to writing this review when I actually intended to but, as usual, that didn’t happen. Basically, I bought a Play Station 3 last week and have spent a large amount of my time since then murdering Russians..)

Directed by the Joel and Ethan Coen, the film sees the brothers return to the 1960′s Minnesota of their youth with its parochial small-town Jewish communities. It’s a world populated by Rabbis, Goys, Schlemiels, Menches and lots and lots of podgy old men with trousers pulled up high above their waists. Like so much of the Coens’ work, the film is both heartbreakingly bleak and side-splittingly funny.

At least I think it’s funny. I did get a bit worried that I was essentially just laughing at Jewish peoples’ mannerisms and was basically being massively anti-semitic.. “Chuckle Chuckle Chuckle! Get a load of those wacky old people from a different cultural background, aren’t they hysterical! And if you like that, wait until you see ‘African Americans’ Bloody Mental!”

Larry Gopnik is having a bad month. He’s got mounting financial problems, a misfit brother crashing on the couch, a son not taking his Bar Mitzvah seriously, he’s been blackmailed at work and now his wife has announced she’s leaving him for Sy Ableman – his smug and pompous acquaintance.

(Actually, I’m not sure that ‘smug and pompous’ is quite the right phrase to use there. I read a review in Time Out that described him as ‘unctuous’. Good word. I was planning on stealing it until I did this Google search and found that literally 8 million hack journalists had got there first. Bit weird?)

Faced with all this hassle and aggravation, Larry turns to a series of rabbis for spiritual guidance on what God, or Hashem, is trying to tell him. I really liked this bit. The Coens have struck upon what, in fact, is the most fundamental question mankind is seeking an answer for.. Not “what is the meaning of life?” but rather “why does annoying shit have to happen all the time?”

It seems to me that, for every other species on the planet, there are only really two concerns: finding stuff to eat and finding stuff to have sex with. Providing you can do this on a regular basis you won’t die and you can pass your DNA on to the next generation. We humans however, with our opposable thumbs and wheels and fires and space stations and internets and Freesat HD; all we’ve really managed to do is evolve a million different ways of fucking ourselves off. Crocodiles don’t do admin – that’s all I’m saying..

Predictably, Larry never really finds the answer to his question although at the end there’s possibly a little clue.. Just before the credits roll we see a glimpse of Larry’s potential future where moderately annoying problems have escalated into properly devastating tragedies. “I wouldn’t ask to many questions, to be honest” Hashem seems to be saying, “No matter how bad you think your life is now, it can always get worse.

Quite a good basis for a religion that, don’t you think?