It’s a Serious Job, But Some Coen’s Got to Do It
Radbam October 16th, 2009
Then YHWH replied to Job out of the tempest and said:
Who is this who darkens counsel, speaking without knowledge? Gird your loins like a man; I will ask and you will inform Me. Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations…Shall one who should be disciplined complain against Shaddai? He who arraigns God must respond.
While the Coen brothers went light on special effects, forgoing the ventriloquism-out-of-the-whirlwind at the conclusion of their film, their denouement, like the Book of Job itself, left the viewer with more questions than answers. And this frustrating but necessary response to the issue of theodicy is but one of many ethnic echoes the Brothers Coen embrace in this most avowedly Jewish of their films.
The very encompassing of the sublime and the suburban gives this foray into faith a comprehensive feel, as the most daunting and annoying struggles of the human condition compete for our consideration and entertainment. A Serious Man is a love letter to the 60’s midwestern suburbia that drove the Coens to non-comformity. And while it stops short of the Rothian and Malamudian ruminations on identity and assimilation, there are familiar tropes of culture clash and nebbishe neuroses.
Amongst the plaudits and pans cast against this work, some critics thought the encapsulation of the 60’s into references to pot and rock were too myopic. But the essence of Job itself is its narrow focus on individual faith and morality against the backdrop of Israel’s national covenant with God. Job is a very personal, and thus abundantly accessible text, and the Coens do justice to its scope and purpose.
A Serious Man saunters (and it does saunter) down this well trodden theological ground with fresh eyes and funky twists: Can the seemingly mathematic predictability of moral causation endure the inevitable chaos-seen-as-evil inherent in the world? Though the Coens demur any deep study of the biblical text as source material, their message parallels Job’s conclusion: The pursuit of faith in the face of chaos and evil is the only thing of which we can be certain.
But the movie is not for everyone. If you have a penchant for the quirky and the indie, and have continued the deep, often drug-induced conversations about meaning and morality beyond the earnest confines of the undergraduate dorm, you’ll find substance and solace. If not, check out the latest light comedy starring any configuration of Sandra Bullock, Ryan Reynolds, Gerald Butler and Cameron Diaz to find the happy endings, or endings at all, that A Serious Man lacks.
In addition to an invented Yiddish folktale that commences the film, and which the Coens wryly contend has nothing to do with the rest of the story, the initial blackness of credits is pierced with a teaching by the seminal medieval rabbinic commentator Rashi. Though I’ve yet to locate the source text for this interpretation, it rings out with a potency that is both Zen-like and Hebrew-Scriptural in its terseness. Apparently food and the absence of Christmas join mystical ambiguity as links binding Asians and Jews:
Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.
A tall order for the anxious, compulsive descendents of pogroms, ghettoes and Madoff, but a high-aim aspiration for anyone in our current climate of doom, gloom and derivatives.
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I totally agree with the Job references, and I originally thought that Rashi’s quote at the beginning of the movie was related to Job, but I would like confirmation of this by some more knowledgeable biblical scholar.
However, I take issue with the idea of “faith” as a guiding Coen principle, Rabbi Weiner. I think a common theme in the Coens’ movies is simply “do what is right”. The consequences of one’s actions are sometimes justified (such as Jerry Lundegard’s demise in Fargo, perhaps) or sometimes not (such as Tommy Lee Jones’ character in “No Country”), but often left to chance events. Rashi would probably view these films and say, “Yeah… sometimes shit happens…just try and do the right thing regardless”. Of course, he would probably say it much more eloquently.
As a Minneapolis Reform Jewish grandson of an Orthodox rabbi, I bonded with this film instantly– I wish I had seen it prior to eating lunch next to the Coen brothers, Frances McDormand and their families at the Convention Grill in Mpls just a few weeks before. I would have loved to ask them a few questions, and I might have gotten up the nerve to do so if I had seen the film.