The one with the Jews, not the gays

A SERIOUS MAN. I am not the only one to get these titles mixed up! When they first announced the Oscar nominations, I saw a couple of blogs accidentally mention that Tom Ford's movie (more to come on that) was nominated for best picture. Ha! Anyhow, I come roaring back into the movie commenting with this response to your post on the Coen brothers' most recent film and as the first step in catching up. I've got a lot of work to do so this will be one of many short posts on this year's movies.

It has been months since I saw this movie, so my memories are admittedly a bit more rusty than I would prefer. You wrote in your post (which you have conveniently already done months ago so I will link to that should a reader need at least a bit more plot synopsis) about perspective and while I think that is possibly one way to approach it, that was not as much what I took from the movie. It seems to me with the prologue and the main story, it was about the Jewish experience as a whole and the inevitability of the struggles the people face. No matter how much things seem to come together, you might enter a house and get stabbed. Or that test might come back positive. Or a tornado might be just off in the distance (the most literal example). For the Jewish people -- and the movie quite clearly makes the heritage of its characters the most defining part of their lives -- that danger is an inevitable outcome. But perhaps I have been watching too much Lost.

Seeing as how I'm trying to keep this short, I will say not too much other than that I think this movie fits in well with other movies in the Joel and Ethan's canon that finds humor in the mundane and, in many ways, the painful. This movie, as with many of theirs, never seem like heavy experiences yet delve into some of the gravest situations, be they murder followed by wood chipper or, in this case, more death, public shame, and the ending of a marriage. It feel right in the middle for me of their two most recent films, which present the more extreme of their serious and comic -- the latter being Burn After Reading, which I found to be a bit too overplayed and not nearly humorous enough to excuse it. If found this movie to be more genuinely funny and although it might not have been quite as much of an achievement as No Country for Old Men (and watching Unforgiven a few nights ago had me itching to rewatch No Country), but it was another example of the Coen brothers' ability to make a movie -- Fargo comes to mind -- that can have enough integrity for its subject matter and respect for its audience to include a seemingly unrelated prologue and a, shall we say, non-crowd-pleasing ending yet still make a movie that is highly entertaining. That ability to find humor where one would never think of finding it is one of their greatest gifts.