You Can't Be Serious

You'd think that so soon after the "Scanners Incident", I'd have at least paced myself before heading into another movie I was almost certain not to like. No such luck. I had A Serious Man sitting here, already received from Netflix.

This is the Coen Brothers' latest film, and that right there should tell you why I expected not to like it. I've seen several of their movies, and never really liked any of them. I only somewhat liked their Oscar winning No Country for Old Men. But there had been a lot of good press about this new movie, and it too has picked up a Best Picture Oscar nomination. Most critics and odd makers think it's not likely to win, though.

I say it had better not. It seems like every year, in the Best Picture category, there's at least one film where I just cannot understand how it ended up nominated. That seemed all the more likely with this year's expanded 10 movie category, and yet having seen 7 of the 10, I hadn't found the one yet. It's not that those seven would all necessarily make my list (indeed, most of them hadn't), but I thought they were at least "pretty good," and I could at least partly grasp the award talk.

A Serious Man, I just don't get. It's a disjointed mess with no real plot and no real point to make. It's simply one hour and 45 minutes of excruciating time in the life of a Jewish father and husband in the 1960s. I say excruciating not just in reference to my personal reaction to the film; on some level, it's supposed to be excruciating. The man is living an awful life, put on by everyone and everything, and wandering adrift without a spine to stick up for what he wants -- that is, if he even knew what that was.

Really, the film is just an opus about "being Jewish." This only real connective tissue in the film provides the only enjoyable scene for me in the entire thing; the pre-credits sequence. It's an extended, eight-minute scene involving a poor Jewish couple living in hard times at some undefined point in the past. It's not even meant to be literal, I think; it plays out like a fairy tale or fable, and is filmed in the 4:3 aspect ratio, unlike the rest of the movie, making it look like an older piece of film somehow restored from somewhere.

It doesn't really have anything to do with the rest of the film, but it is entertaining, as the couple argues over whether a man the husband met on the road is in fact the ghost of someone who died three years before. And then the possible ghost -- dybbuk -- shows up on their doorstep, in the personage of veteran actor Fyvush Finkel. The scene is both fun and a bit unsettling, though like the rest of the movie, it too goes nowhere -- ending without explanation and never again to come up in the rest of the movie. Perhaps this is foreshadowing, though, in that the entire movie itself has an unsatisfying non-ending... it just appears that at some point, the Coen Brothers had the camera taken away from them.

If only someone had done that before they started filming. I give this film a D-. Even with five extra Best Picture slots to spare, it was a waste spending one on this.