Thursday 12th November 2009
by Caroline
Those of you who know me know that I am very fond of Jewish literature, mostly American. My friend Nathan is a Twin Cities Jew whose mother grew up in the same suburb as the Coen brothers — St Louis Park, or “St Jewish Park,” Nathan informed me.
Mild spoilers. Read at your own risk.
The Coen brothers set their movie A Serious Man in St Louis Park in 1967, when Nathan’s mom was a girl and would have seen a similar landscape in her everyday life. And after their more spectacular movies, relatively speaking, this is a small character piece. Very little happens — main character Larry, an uber cerebral physics professor, has a sudden onslaught of bad luck and attempts to find a reason why. He ventures through traditional Judaism, the crazy-seeming mysticism of his sad brother, and pure science.
Near the beginning of the movie, a student who has failed Larry’s physics midterm tells Larry he understands all the anecdotes but did not realize physics involved actually doing the math. As Larry struggles to convince the student that physics IS the math, not the stories, it’s clear that he’s about to learn some kind of lesson.
Once my boss described me by saying I hate it when people aren’t logical, and in a way, that’s dead accurate. To dig into it deeper, I am really frustrated when people act without any regard or thought in a world that already makes no sense most of the time. Nathan probably feels the same way, and I think the movie hit home for both of us because we share this attitude. You can see it on Larry’s face when the events in his life confuse him, and he can’t even make enough sense of them to get angry. Near the movie’s end, Larry’s brother has an emotional outburst and says a lot of what Larry hasn’t articulated for himself yet, and it’s a wonderful, purgative moment. Larry’s life perplexes him because he has done everything right, accurately, or at least unexceptionally; when it begins to fall apart, he has to rethink all of his actions.
This movie is thick with references to Jewish life and culture, which I really enjoyed — I told Nathan, no movie I can think of has spent this much loving detail on American Judaism: Hebrew school, bar mitzvahs, Yiddish phrases, a mezuzah in every doorway.
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