Just a quick note to poke you in the direction of Empire magazine’s website. They have an exclusive clip from A Serious Man. It is the scene where Larry (Michael Stuhlbarg) is visited by his flunking student, Clive.

Click here to get yourself zapped to Empire’s site.

Cracks me up when Clive says “Secret test… hush, hush!”

Last night I travelled the 150 mile round trip to see A Serious Man at the Leeds International Film Festival. The screening was held at the Town Hall and was run by a mobile cinema firm called Reels on Wheels. The room was very large and decadent but, alas, the screen was not and the room was so big that the sound was lost in it to a degree. However, seeing the movie almost two weeks early (and without 40 minutes of adverts and trailers) made any shortcomings quickly disappear.

I don’t want to recount too much of the plot because the review would then inevitably contain spoilers, not to say that my words below do not- you have been warned!

Poor, poor Larry!

The movie centres around Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a university physics proffessor in Minneapolis during 1967 and he’s having a rough time of it. Misery after misery is piled upon him (cruel, cruel Coen brothers). His wife wants a divorce- she’s taken up with a family friend, his son is about to be Bar Mitzvahed but is experimenting with pot and has signed up for the Columbia Record Club under his name, he’s up for tenure at the university which has it’s own stresses, he may or may not be involved in an exam grades blackmail scheme, his brother is in a bit of trouble with the police and to top it all off he’s had a prang in his car.  All of these are factors are mostly beyond his control and form the perfect miserable storm, the result of which is he’s financially doomed, depressed and seeking the meaning of life. Plot wise, that’s pretty much the crux of it. How each trial pans out is where the movie and the humour lies.

First thing’s first A Serious Man is seriously funny. It’s a lot funnier than I was expecting. The Coens do a neat line in black humour but this movie isn’t really all that dark but nor is it goofy. It straddles the line between the out-and-out comedy mayhem of Raising Arizona or Burn After Reading and the should-or-shouldn’t-I-laugh bleakness of, say, Fargo. All of the characters are very Coenesque as are all of the situations. If you’re at all familiar with their oeuvre you will know what to expect in terms of tone. The writing is typically brilliant with some scenes containing hilarious overlapping dialogue and repeated phrases (“Out in a minute”). It is unobtrusively shot, that is there are no flashy camera angles, sweeping vistas or fancy-Dan pans, it’s all pretty conservatively done which allows the characters to come to the forefront.

The movie contains a lot of Yiddish. A lot. But happily it is easy to work out what is meant even if, like me, the words are entirely new to you. Sometimes they are explained to a character on screen (really for us I suspect) and sometimes it’s just very obvious what is meant by the context. Anyway the use of language is absolutely not a barried to enjoying and “getting” the movie. Either way you can see a handy glossary here.

"We're going to be fine."

I do have some comments about the movie which could be seen as short comings. Larry’s brother, Arthur (Richard Kind) busily works on a journal he calls “the Mentaculus”. Now my problem with this is that it is never really clear what this is. Two scenes mention the fact that it is a probability map and that Arthur has been successful during card games but beyond that it’s never mentioned. For such a large part of a character’s life it almost seems throw away. Certainly more screen time is spent on the draining of Arthur’s sebacious cyst than on his staggering work of mathematics. He’s a genius with a brilliant mind but this is never pursued.

Much has been said of the opening montage in the Polish shtetl and that it apparenlty makes sense come the end of the movie but I have to say, I am at a loss with this one. It was a funny little scene and I’m glad it’s there but I have no idea what it is there for. I suspect it’s the Coen brothers openly mocking their audience again but perhaps I missed something…

My main bug bear with the movie is the ending. So Larry gets some bad news about his health from his doctor, a tornado is fast approaching and the movie ends. That’s it? Why? What? Am I missing something here? For me the movie went from five stars to four in that one instant. A real shame there was no closure. Did Larry get back with the wife as was hinted at during the Bar Mitzvah? How ill is he? It was like the end of final season of The Sopranos – nothing! Perhaps it had something to do with the movie’s opening quote from Rashi- “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.” Perhaps we, the audience, are just supposed to accept how the movie ends and move on.

The pefrormances are really very good. There are no genuine stars in the movie but lots of faces you will recognise. Obviously the most recognisable of which is Spin City’s Richard Kind but you will also notice Adam Arkin and George Wyner. I particularly enjoyed the very brief and completely unexpected cameos by Michael Lerner (as Larry’s property lawyer) and Steve Park (as Clive’s father) both of whom make their second appearance in a Coen brothers’ movie and therefore qualify for my Family Tree section. Michael Stuhlbarg is in pretty much every scene and his performance is, as reported everywhere, tremendous. I’ll be very surprised if we don’t see lot of Mr. Stuhlbarg over the coming years. He plays Larry comedically but without overstepping the mark in to farce. You feel for Larry and empathise with the troubles he is facing. He’s put upon but admirably not down, he continues to function in his life. The other stand out is Aaron Wolff, who plays Larry’s son Danny who also knocks his performance out of the park. Two emerging talents to watch no doubt.

Proud parents

I always try to position a new Coen brothers move in amongst the others to see where it fits in my estimations. For me, A Serious Man, is not a masterpiece like Fargo, Miller’s Crossing or The Big Lebowski but nor is it disposible like the underrated Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, it sits somewhere between, perhaps in the top quarter of the table. It is hard writing reviews at the best of times but it is harder still to write them after seeing a film only once which is the case here. The LIFF hand out little scorecards on the way into the movie and collect them on the way out to establish which movie was the best of the festival. I really wanted to give A Serious Man the full five stars but in the end I gave it four primarily due to the unsatisfactory ending. Perhaps it will win anyway- the Coens might have figured this all out with Arthur’s Mentaculus.

5 4 stars

Hi all,

Firstly to apologise for letting a lot of the site slide for the last few months. I’ve pretty much only been updating the news page but nothing else. My bad. I had some computer problems which are now sorted so I should be in a better position to keep on top of the rest of the site too.

Anyway, it was mainly housekeeping type stuff so you may not even notice most of the changes. What you may notice is A Serious Man header images in rotation with the rest at the top of the page (hit F5 to check them out but do so on an A Serious Man specific page or you could be there a looong time). In addition I have updated the A Serious Man movie page along with the reviews and, what I insist on calling multimedia even though it’s really only images.

I have taken the bold step of adding True Grit to the roster of Coen brothers movies too as it does seem to be going ahead.

Hope you like the changes, any problems let me know.

Paul.

The BBFC have granted the Coen’s latest a 15 certificate for the below reasons (WARNING contains spoilers);

A SERIOUS MAN is a black comedy set in the US Midwest in the late 1960s. The central character is a Jewish physics professor, Larry Gopnik, who seeks guidance from his rabbis when his life begins to fall apart. The film was passed ‘15’ for strong language and soft drug use.

The BBFC Guidelines at ‘15’ state that there may be frequent use of strong language (for example ‘fuck’). This film includes in the region of sixteen uses of that particular term. The work also contains two brief scenes of marijuana smoking. In one a group of adolescent youths share a joint and in the other Gopnik is offered a joint by a female neighbour. Moreover, in a comic sequence at the very end of the work Gopnik’s son, Danny, is clearly suffering from the effects of marijuana use during the course of his bar mitzvah. However, these scenes are acceptable at ‘15’ in this case as the film as a whole does not promote or encourage drug misuse.

A SERIOUS MAN also includes a fantasy love scene in which Gopnik is seen lying on his back on a bed as his female neighbour straddles and gently rides him. There is no nudity and the portrayal of sexual activity is sufficiently brief and discreet to have been allowed at ‘12A’. Earlier in the film we see the same female neighbour sunbathing naked in her garden. She is seen in long shot and very little detail can be made out. There are no constraints on nudity in a non-sexual context at ‘15’.

When submitted to the BBFC the work had a running time of 105m 21sThe running time of this film was calculated from the measured length of 9481+9 ( feet + frames ).

Long time YKFK reader Bunnie has been in touch with me once again. She’s managed to track down further details of that True Grit casting call. The call is actually for the lead role and focus of the adaptation- the 14 year-old girl, Mattie Ross, whose father has been killed in the story. The session will take place from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday at Homewood Suites, 5320 W. Loop 289. They are seeking a white girl between the ages of 12 and 16 and the publicity states;

“We are looking for a Caucasian girl who is tough, strong and tells it like it is. We are open to all looks. 14-year-old Mattie is a simple, tough-as-nails young woman. Her steely nerves and straightforward manner are a shocking contrast to the way women behaved in the early century. She is possessed of true grit and plenty of determination, enough so that she insists on going with two marshals to hunt down the killer of her father.”

More information here.

Thanks again to Bunnie!

This isn’t a Coen brothers new update at all, just a note from letting you know that I have tickets to see A Serious Man on Sunday 8th November at the Leeds International Film Festival a full 12 days before its official release! I’ll get my review up as soon as I can.

Looking forward to it immensely!

The brothers Coen appeared on the Charlie Rose show to discuss A Serious Man. Along for the ride were two of the movie’s stars, Michael Stuhlbarg and Richard Kind. You can watch the whole 22 minute segment on the Charlie Rose website if you hit “archive” and scroll down a little (coincidentally the very next clip in the list is with an author called Alison Gopnik!!!). Or you can read a transcript here.

Near the start Joel quips that it’s one of those race occasions where the trailer is better than the movie, they discuss the slurping of soup and reveal their private working title – “The Jew Movie”.

All in all it isn’t terribly revealing but an interview with the Coen brothers is a rare thing so you should check it out.

Thanks to David for spotting this one!

InstantCast.com has an open casting call for “teens” to fill parts in the Coen brothers next movie, True Grit. Unfortunately the details are hidden unless you’re a “VIP member” which, alas, I am not. However, if you ARE, I’d love to know what it says.

Finally the trailer for the Chinese remake of the Coen brothers’ debut, Blood Simple, has been released. Directed by acclaimed Chinese director, Zhang Yimou and retitled “Amazing Tales: Three Guns” it looking every inch as beautiful to look at as his previous movies Hero and House of the Flying Daggers if a little bonkers. I have no idea how close it will stick to the plot of the original as the trailer lacks subtitles at the moment.

You can watch it over at Firstshowing.net or embedded below;

Thanks to Bunny for rooting this out.