Dreams can quickly turn into nightmares. In "A Serious Man" (2009) this realization dawns slowly and painfully on Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor whose life has taken a turn for the worse. The film, set in 1960s Minnesota, is more aware of how easily pleasant fantasy can change to frightening phantasm than any of its characters. It is constantly tiptoeing along the line between comedy and horror.
"A Serious Man" comes from the Coen Brothers,' a duo notorious for creating films in which their characters face a series of trials without ever seeming to deserve any of the difficulties inflicted on them. Accordingly, Larry begins the movie with far too much on his plate: he is waiting to see if his tenure at the University will be accepted, his son, Danny (Aaron Wolff), has a bar mitzvah coming up, his unemployed brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is staying at his house and a student is trying to bribe and/or blackmail him.
On top of these concerns, Larry finds out that his wife is leaving him for his colleague Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed). And things just get worse from there.
The feeling that Larry is some kind of marked man pervades the film, though the Coens wisely refuse to disclose whether or not he deserves this fate. Perhaps because of his scientific nature as a physics professor, Larry spends most of the story in a constant state of disbelief; he can't find any certifiable evidence to support the existence of his problems. His family is no help — each of them is caught up with his or her own problems and is always yelling at him to fix the poor reception on the TV or asking to borrow money.
Larry turns to his Rabbis, asking each of them in turn what he should do to live a good, honest life. The closest thing he gets to actual advice is a strange parable about a Jewish dentist who finds the words "help me" carved into the teeth of one of his gentile patients. When Larry asks the Rabbi what the point of this story is, the Rabbi replies that there isn't one: The only one who might know is God, and He's not telling.
Through careful direction and writing, the Coen Brothers construct Larry's world as a place where chaos reigns while its inhabitants try in vain to impose even the smallest semblance of order on things. The film mirrors Larry's desire for order and meaning by neatly organizing itself into chapters, and the title of each appears on screen as title cards and labeled in relation to the Rabbis he questions. But order is not what the film endorses. There are too many loose ends, and reality itself is sometimes called into question, especially when Larry begins having increasingly strange dreams which turn into nightmares.
All of this seems to paint the film as a bleak drama, but its execution and inclusion of things like the Jewish dentist story and a Yiddish prologue turn "A Serious Man" into enough of a fable to keep the darkness at arm's length. The film is a comedy, albeit a black one. Much of the humor hinges on Michael Stuhlbarg's pitch-perfect performance as Larry and his believable incredulity. As he repeats throughout the film, "I haven't done anything!"
The film ends with most of its issues unresolved, but neatly tying up all of the plot's loose ends isn't the point. Like the story of the dentist, the Coens have told a tale that only they know the meaning of (if it has any meaning at all). At the very least, it seems apparent that Larry, in accordance with the Jefferson Airplane song that bookends the film, could use "Somebody to Love."
