Saturday, November 21, 2009

A Serious Man (2009), Ethan and Joel Coen.


Is this about F-troop?

I couldn't pull my eyes away from the screen when I, along with about four other people, was watching it a couple weeks ago.  So much gaudy detail and fabulous colours. 

But not a perfect film.   Larry Gopnik, the central protagonist in search of the meaning of life, is too much of a cipher to compel us to sympathize with him.  He the inverse of Tarantino's The Bear Jew: he can't get mad.  He's a gawky physics teacher who writes formulas on the black board in herky jerky chicken scratch with his ass thrust out.  He takes us right back to the stereotype of male Jew as spineless schmo.  But worse in terms of storytelling, he's almost unreadable.  During the film, he doesn't have any real conversation with his kids or his alienated wife, or colleagues or anyone.  Who is this guy?  What the hell does he think of everything going on around him?  What we do know is that his life is falling apart and he is deeply driven to understand "why me"?  But if Job was a boring dipshit, would we care?

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