A Serious Man

There seem to be a number of things the Coen Brothers got just right in their recent film, A Serious Man. The first thing I noticed about it was the pace was right – for a film that tells the story of an ordinary life, the narrative ambles, with extended scenes (longer than they need to be) made up of everyday dialogue. It’s deliberately slow to go anywhere which entirely suits its subject matter. When it does appear to venture out beyond the ordinary, like when Larry’s depressed brother crosses the border into Canada, we find that Larry’s only dreaming. So we come back to Larry’s plethora of problems. This is where it works. Too many films purport to tell stories of the everyday only to lose sight of that intention, developing an ending that seems altogether extraordinary, or at least out there and beyond any of the experiences most of us have had living in suburbia. Sure these things happen but…So this Coen film is about control. As a film whose topic is ordinary things, it insists on its own ordinariness, which paradoxically lifts it out of the ordinary. It’s slow, a bit ponderous, but never banal. It got mainly middling reviews, the grounds for which I can’t remember. It’s worth a look.