Once you've treaded the bleak waters of Cormac McCarthy, and nabbed Oscars for your nihilistic streak that's now in vogue, where to go next? Back into the art house, the Coen brothers have decided. Back into the casting pool of indie unknowns. Back into the synagogue.
No Country for Old Men was a desolate firecracker that churned suspense the old-fashioned way, an intricate insistence on craft. But the abrupt ending, and Javier Bardem's unpunished murder spree: those surprised as much as his lethal air compressor. The Coens' next outing, Burn after Reading, culminated in a cat's cradle of plot threads -- yet the mix of wrong-place-wrong-time encounters was frustratingly kept off-screen. Comeuppance for the wicked, a Coen staple from Fargo to The Ladykillers, now fails to mollify the brothers.
A Serious Man continues the theme of man pitted against an uncaring world. More explicitly in this film, man vies against God, as Job did in the Old Testament. If only half the plotlines that flicker by produce answers, the final foreshortened vista opens up a fourth act, not committed to celluloid, that disavows all notions of good vanquishing evil and happily-ever-afters.
Sounds like a downer? The Coens draw comedy out of everyday setbacks -- and ethnoreligious stereotypes. Unceasing tsuris and kvetching battle against the movie's simple, under-the-radar approach, and at times the squinting, nebbishy physical tics actors rely on threaten to overwhelm. Thankfully, Michael Stuhlberg balances all that mishegoss with an endearing portrayal of mensch Larry Gopnik, unfairly dealt a poor hand. Mazel tov to the Coens for taking a chance on theater-raised talent.
You won't be ver clempt by the end. Larry Gopnik's journey is heady and existential, set in 1967 but nostalgic and twinkly enough to be 1950. As his mind becomes overburned, nightmarish visions invade, superimposing a sexuality and violence on the film that were just breaking through in the late 1960s. Larry's crisis of faith, possibly cyclical or more probably aimless, is definitely contemporary. And also entertaining. The Coens are master puppeteers, their audiences collective Jobs dependent upon their give-a-little, take-a-little hand. Don't think they take their job too seriously.
1 comment:
I'm glad that neither of us are still speechless.
Post a Comment