Suffering piled on with gleeful sadism
Andrew M Brown hails the Coen brothers' 14th outing – a film that says much about suffering

20 November 2009

Larry (Michael Stuhlbarg) has just discovered that his wife wants to run away with slimy Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed). Here, Sy offers a hug as he delivers the crushing news AP Photo/Ron Edmonds

In their 14th film, Joel and Ethan Coen seem to be asking the question: how much arbitrary suffering can an average, righteous fellow endure before he breaks down and shouts at God (or the Coen brothers)? It is very funny and the acting by mostly unknown and stage performers is outstanding.

As the undeserved misfortunes pile up for the central character you feel like plunging head into hands. The Job-like hero is Larry Gopnick (an affecting performance by Michael Stuhlbarg). He’s a physics professor at a Midwestern university who lives with his wife and teenage children in a clapboard bungalow that’s part of a new suburb built on the treeless prairies.

It is 1967. Jefferson Airplane is in the charts: the film opens and closes with Grace Slick bellowing “Somebody to Love”. Larry’s son Danny, a couple of weeks shy of his bar mitzvah, listens to the song via an earpiece during Hebrew class, until the teacher confiscates his radio and entrusts it to the fearsome Rabbi Marshak. Danny smokes pot, too, and orders LPs in his father’s name from the Columbia record club.

Larry’s daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) filches money from his wallet for a nose job. And they have a lodger, Uncle Arthur (Richard Kind), an unemployed maths genius afflicted with a sebaceous cyst on his neck that necessitates hours in the bathroom with an evacuating machine. Still, despite seditious rumblings the Gopnicks are a world away from the liberating visions of the Airplane; they’re not about to turn on, tune in or drop out.

The first cruel blow for Larry comes when his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) self-righteously announces one night, as he’s doing some marking, that she wants a divorce. She’s become dissatisfied with Larry’s apparent lack of “seriousness” and has latched on to a “serious man” in their community – Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed).

Melamed is brilliant as Ableman, an infuriating cad in a Tahitian shirt – he probably goes on cruises – who puts on a superior, oleaginous manner. He and Judith are close, but as she tells Larry indignantly: “This is not about whoopsie doopsie.”

The thing is, under Jewish law she needs a get so that she can marry Sy. In no time the two of them have bullied Larry into moving out of the house and renting at the Jolly Roger motel. Stuhlbarg’s Larry furrows his brow but yields, as he invariably does, and takes his brother Arthur with him. Arthur presents an alternative to Larry’s response to suffering – he’s resentful and blaming where Larry is astonishingly patient.

Larry seeks advice both from a lawyer (Adam Arkin) and from a succession of rabbis. “What does it all mean?” he pleads. “What is Hashem trying to tell me?” The rabbis can only recite anecdotes that have no discernible meaning. “We can’t know everything,” says one. “It sounds like you don’t know anything,” replies Larry.

At every turn Larry is buffeted by challenges to his peace of mind, in a cascade effect that the Coens orchestrate with gleeful sadism. Take his neighbours. On one side is Mr Brandt, a menacing goy with a crew cut who for some reason insists on mowing part of Larry’s lawn and takes his son Mitch out of school to go deer-hunting (they return with a bloody stag strapped to the roof of the station wagon).

On the other side is dishy, stoned Mrs Samsky (Amy Landecker), whom Larry spots sunbathing stark naked one afternoon. He’s on the roof fiddling with the television aerial so his son can tune into F-Troop. He gawps for so long he collapses with sunburn. Then there’s his work: the university board is meeting to decide whether to grant Larry tenure – which would offer the kind of security Judith might appreciate – but someone’s writing anonymous letters accusing him of moral turpitude. And a Korean student offers him cash to raise his grade to a pass as his father threatens to sue him.

The film opens with an alarming Yiddish made-up folk tale set in a Polish shtetl, about a dybbuk (a sort of ghost), that bears scant relation to the subsequent story except to establish a mood, to say we’re in mythic or fabulous territory.

On the whole, the directors restrain their tendency to distort or heighten reality, barring a couple of absurdist deaths and some disorienting close-ups. With their production and costume designers Jess Gonchor and Mary Zophres, they anchor the movie in its milieu with an abundance of detail and Roger Deakins photographs it with hyperreal clarity (as he did with another suburban nightmare, Revolutionary Road).

The film represents the brothers’ own Midwestern Jewish childhood and it has the force of personal memory. Its achievement, though, is to get beyond the particular and say something truthful about suffering generally, something plenty of goy viewers will recognise as well. .