Friday Films: When the Truth is Found to Be Lies

I finally saw the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, and I have to say: right after I watched it, I hated the ending. If you haven’t seen it, don’t read ahead—I can’t talk about the movie without spoiling the ending. As disappointed as I initially was with how the movie ended, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and the more I did, the more I understood what they were trying to accomplish with it; but more on that later.

The movie follows Larry Gopnik, a college physics professor going through a “rough patch,” which I would say is an understatement. His wife wants a divorce, someone has written letters that threaten to keep him from receiving tenure, his kids are awful, and people around him keep dying. Larry is facing a crisis, so he begins to visit with his rabbis to try to get some kind of explanation.

The first rabbi, actually a junior rabbi, suggests that Larry has forgotten the presence of God in everything around him. “Look at the parking lot,” he says, “as if you’ve never seen it before.” The second rabbi relates the story of a Jewish dentist who saw words written in Hebrew on the back of a goyim patient’s teeth and almost drove himself crazy trying to understand the meaning. The third rabbi won’t even see Larry—he’s busy contemplating the lyrics to Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love.”

The movie ends abruptly, with Larry’s doctor calling him about something they found in an x-ray early in the movie and a looming tornado. That’s it. Like I said, at first I hated it, and then the entire next day, I was thinking about how the whole movie seemed like a riff on the book of Job. And then I realized: it’s not just based on the book of Job, it’s adapted from it. The three rabbis are Job’s friends, the kids being awful and out-of-touch stand in for Job’s kids being taken from him, denying Larry tenure is the equivalent of taking away his livestock. The Coens took the book and transplanted it to the Midwest in the 1960s, and by looking at it this way the ending makes perfect sense. Toward the end of Job, God appears as a whirlwind and pretty much chastises everyone for thinking they can actually understand his reasons. Only here, we don't see the ending in which Job gets everything back.

On the whole, this was a much better movie than No Country for Old Men, which I didn't even care for after a full day of puzzling over it. The Coen brothers are really talented filmmakers, and their attention to detail in recreating a suburb in the 1960s was really impressive. I had never considered the idea of Job being a black comedy, but I think it worked. My only question--and I guess the part that I'm kind of unsatisfied about--is the opening of the movie. Does anyone have an explanation for the part with the old man and the dybbuk?