The Old Testament has always fascinated me.
The God I learned about growing up was a loving God, stern but forgiving, merciful. But when I got a little older and started studying the Bible, I read the stories of the Old Testament with great interest. The God of the Old Testament was more frightening, a much harsher disciplinarian. After all, this is the God who tested Abraham by asking him to sacrifice his son, Isaac, and then said, “Hey, just kidding,” moments before Abraham would have gone through with it. In the end, it all worked out pretty well for Abraham, who was amply rewarded for this unquestioning demonstration of faith, but I still found the story difficult to comprehend. Why would God make such a request in the first place? Based on my understanding of God, it seemed out of character, and rather cruel.
But then, I’m a Christian, and the Coen Brother’s new movie, “A Serious Man,” is steeped in Jewishness. The film, which concerns a mild-mannered physics professor (Michael Stuhlbarg) named Larry Gopnik who is hit by a series of modern-day calamities — his wife wants a divorce, a student wants to bribe him for a passing grade, his son is smoking too much pot, the man from Columbia Records is hounding him, telling him he owes money for Santana’s “Abraxis” — is supposedly based on the Book of Job.
In the Book of Job, Satan suggests to God that Job is a pious man because he is prosperous and has never really suffered; in response, God allows Satan to destroy Job’s possessions, kill his offspring and afflict him with physical ailments such as boils as a way of gauging the depth of Job’s faith.
Larry Gopnik is a stand-in for Job. He seeks counsel from a series of rabbis, who are entertaining for the viewer, but do not yield much in the way of insight or helpful advice. He asks why these bad things are happening to him, and what God wants him to do. “Why does He make us feel the questions if He’s not going to give us the answers?” he wonders, in despair.
The film sounds depressing, but it’s actually quite funny, although the Coen Brothers work hard to keep the audience off balance. There are no big laughs in this film, only moments of darkly quiet humor that stem from the film’s bleak outlook and pitch-perfect depiction of a Jewish family living in a Midwestern suburb in the late 1960s. “A Serious Man” also lacks big stars — the only person I recognized was Richard Kind, who plays Larry’s shiftless brother, from the sitcom “Spin City” — but it’s very well-acted.
Still, I have no idea how audiences will respond to this movie, which is unlike anything else in the Coen Brothers canon, except maybe “Barton Fink,” and “Barton Fink” was about a writer driving himself crazy, not questions of good and evil and the role God (the characters in “A Serious Man” refer to God as Hashem, which means The Name in Hebrew) plays in the lives of everyday people.
As I watched Larry’s life fall apart, I wondered whether the Coen Brothers were trying to show what it’s like to be a person of faith in a godless world. But the film’s abrupt and inconclusive ending made me see everything that came before it a little differently. There is a God in this film, but it’s the cruel and frightening God who allowed Satan to torment Job and tested Abraham by asking him to kill his son. The motives of this God are ultimately inscrutable, which is why, when SPOILER ALERT! DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW HOW THE FILM ENDS! a tornado bears down upon Larry’s son’s Hebrew school, moments after Larry has received an ominous phone call from his doctor, we can only wonder what it all means, if anything.
And because the film ends suddenly, with a shot of the approaching storm, it’s impossible to know what happens next — whether everything is destroyed, or whether Larry’s son hides safely in the basement, or what. And because the tornado appears moments after Larry has decided to accept his disgruntled student’s bribe to pay his divorce lawyer, it’s easy to see the storm as a punitive expression of God’s wrath, although I think that interpretation is too simplistic.
But what it all means, I cannot say. Theologians and philosophers have been studying the problem of evil — the question of why bad things happen to good people — for centuries, and failed to come up with a satisfactory answer. So it’s a bit unreasonable to expect the Coen Brothers to do so. What’s interesting is watching them ask the question, and struggle with it.
Of course, not every discussion of the problem of evil takes 90 minutes. When I got home after the movie, I glanced at my wall and noticed my framed and autographed Hagar the Horrible cartoon. The cartoon is two panels; in the first one, Hagar is standing on a sinking ship, gazing up at the clouds and yelling, “Why me?” In the next panel, a voice from the cloud answers “Why not?”
Hagar cartoonist Chris Browne (his father drew the original strips) told me that this comic has a special meaning to him. When his wife and daughter were in a bad car accident, he was sitting in the hospital waiting room waiting for information, and the nurse, upon discovering who he was, pulled the “Why me?” strip out of her wallet. At that moment, Browne told me, the comic really spoke to him. So maybe everybody feels a little bit like Job at times.
There’s some interesting chatter on the web about “A Serious Man,” particularly from religious folks. In an essay on the site ThinkChristian.net (click here) a writer suggests the Coens don’t understand the book of Job. In this essay, (click here) a rabbi suggests that the Coens don’t take their Jewish faith seriously enough. And in this essay (click here) a Catholic blogger writes about uncertainty, and the grace of faith, and how they relate to the film.
PARKOUR MOVIE
I wrote an article about parkour — a physical discipline in which participants vault, jump and climb over obstacles to get from point A to point B in the most efficient way possible — for the Sunday Gazette, and as part of my research I watched the 2004 French action film “District B13,” which stars David Belle, considered the founder of parkour.
The plot of the movie concerns an effort to infiltrate a lawless French ghetto and dismantle a dangerous bomb, but the real reason to watch it are the terrific stunts, many of which require Belle to leap and run all over the place. The opening sequence is pretty impressive; you can watch it here.
I then watched the cult 1979 action film “The Warriors,” about a gang trying to make it home to Coney Island when all the other gangs in New York City are trying to hunt it down. “The Warriors” is like a parkour film before there was such a thing, because much of the movie depicts the hunted gang members running, jumping and climbing over subway turnstiles, fire escapes and staircases.
With “The Warriors,” director Walter Hill succeeded in creating an extremely weird and stylized vision of New York City gang-life; the film is a fantasy, with influences that include blaxploitation (one of the film’s signature lines is “Can you dig it?”) and comic books. Every gang has a very distinctive appearance. My favorite was the Baseball Furies, whose members dress in pinstripes, wield baseball bats and wear make-up similar to the band KISS. “The Warriors” is great to look at, and pretty exciting. Some cult films don’t deserve their cult, but this one does.
Got a comment? E-mail me at sfoss@dailygazette.net.
