Last week, my brother came home for Spring Break, and one of the first
things on his agenda was seeing a couple more of the Oscar nominees
before the Academy Awards. The last one we squeezed in was the Coen
Brothers’ A Serious Man. I hadn’t heard much about this movie until Entertainment Weekly‘s Doc Jensen used it as a major point of reference in one of his recent LOST
columns. Naturally, that got me intrigued, and when I watched the movie
myself, I saw what he meant about all the connections between the dark
comedy and the soon-to-be-over fantastical drama.
A Serious Man
stars Michael Stuhlbarg as Larry Gopnik, a mild-mannered Jewish physics
professor whose life begins to unravel as disasters pile up. His wife
(Sari Lennick) is having an affair. One of his students (David Tang) is
failing his course and is not about to docilely accept an “F”. His
brother (Richard Kind) has moved in with him and, on top of his many
problems, has a tendency to monopolize the bathroom for hours at a time.
His kids (Aaron Wolff and Jessica McManus) are both self-involved
brats. And then people start dropping dead around him...
Larry
is a meek mouse of a man who doesn’t understand why all of these
terrible things are happening to him. Hoping for a little perspective,
he consults a series of rabbis, who offer advice that is more baffling
than helpful. He longs to be “a serious man” like Sy (Fred Melamed), his
wife’s corpulent lover, but the more he ponders, the more nonsensical
it all seems. To make matters worse, he frequently has disorientingly
vivid dreams, making it increasingly difficult for him to discern
between reality and the byproducts of his tortured mind.
As I mentioned in my review of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, this question of what is real and what isn’t pervades LOST.
Indeed, many still hold to the theory that none of the events on the
Island have actually happened - that they are all a dream. Head writers
Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have promised that this will not be
revealed to be the case. However, they also once promised that the
series would never include time travel...
This is a movie
steeped in Jewish culture, beginning with what looks like a folktale
involving a Tevye-ish man, his Golde-ish wife and a mysterious visitor.
This strange opening is never explained or even referenced again, and
we’re left to ponder how it fits in, much as Larry must try to make
sense of the rabbis’ words of wisdom. The cover of the DVD shows Larry
on the roof, which again invites comparisons to Fiddler on the Roof,
particularly Tevye’s remark that “Without our traditions, our lives
would be as shaky as a fiddler on the roof!” Larry’s life is shaky
indeed, and he’s hoping that the richness of those traditions will help
to anchor him.
The first rabbi is the youthful Rabbi Scott,
portrayed by Simon Helberg. As I’ve previously seen him as a lethargic
sidekick to Dr. Horrible and a cheesy, girl-crazy scientist on The Big Bang Theory,
I had to chuckle at the idea of him as a rabbi. Despite his relative
inexperience, however, he seems fairly competent, and certainly
passionate. He talks about the difficulty of seeing the divine at work
in the world and the need for some perspective to make God’s presence
clear. “You think, well, if I can't see Him, He isn't there any more,
He's gone,” Scott says. “But that's not the case. You just need to
remember how to see Him.”
On LOST, faith has been a
prominent theme since the beginning, and now, partway into the final
season, we’re seeing many characters wrestling with the very issue the
young rabbi describes when it comes to the Island’s very own seemingly
benevolent but aloof caretaker. The rabbi goes on to bring up the iconic
Fate vs Free Will debate, and there’s a hint of John Locke in his
assertion that everything that happens is an expression of God’s will.
The bald boar-hunter would certainly agree that “You can't cut yourself
off from the mystical or you'll be - you'll remain - completely lost.”
The second rabbi, Rabbi Nachter (George Wyner), is older and presumably
more qualified to dole out sage advice. He decides to help out by
telling Larry a long, convoluted story full of strange circumstances and
presumed hidden meaning. But the tale ends with a series of questions
to which he does not have any answers. He reminds me very much of Damon
and Carlton, who have been fielding more angry inquiries than ever as to
the meaning of this incredibly strange journey on which they’ve taken
us. Many viewers fear that in the end, it’s not going to make any sense.
Many threads will be left dangling, and like Larry, we’ll be left
demanding, “It sounds like you don't know anything! Why even tell me the
story?” What was the point of it all?
“Hashem doesn't owe us the answer,” the rabbi serenely advises him. LOST‘s
Jacob isn’t big on distributing answers, which frustrates some and
infuriates others. He generally prefers to leave the people under his
dominion guessing, letting them work things out for themselves. He wants
them to be “serious men,” to puzzle things out and to learn from the
harrowing challenges they face. Like Larry, many of them seem to have
Job-like misery inflicted upon them. How they respond to such tests is a
mark of their resilience and their faith, however submerged it may be.
A Serious Man is a quiet kind of comedy, with plenty of dry laughs and even more room for rumination. It is less violent than No Country for Old Men
but more profane, and arguably just as tragic. Nonetheless, there are
uplifting moments, along with plenty of heady conversations, including a
mention of Schrodinger’s Cat, which not only has LOST
applicability but seems to have turned up in every bit of science
fiction I’ve encountered in the past year. This thought experiment has
to do with the possibility of multiple outcomes. As long as the box
stays closed, one is free to assume that inside awaits a tranquil scene
or a disaster. This is the type of uncertainty that pervades A Serious Man and LOST alike. Unsettling? Often. But also riveting.
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