When the truth is found to be lies
And all the joy within you dies
--Jefferson Airplane "Somebody to Love"   

Ever since 1996's somewhat-underrated dark comedy The Cable Guy, I have associated the above lines--for better or worse--with Jim Carrey's godawful karaoke rendition featured in the film. But from now on, I will associate these lines with the new Coen brothers' dark comedy A Serious Man.     

A Serious Man, Coen Brothers' new film

This comparison is far more apt and instructive than at first glance: I can remember very well that in 1996--The Cable Guy was considered the dark comedy of the 1990s [you must ignore, at least for the moment, Fargo--I'm getting there]. In fact, I recall that this film is how the term dark (or black) comedy was taught to me. Of course, I was not the progeny of any film critics, but that is precisely my point: everyday people in America told their children that Cable Guy was a dark comedy. Today the exact same movie would be considered inane, overdone, and far from dark; mainly awkward.    

Fargo came out in the same year, instantly revolutionizing the genre of dark comedy. You see, although the two films were contemporaneous, the popular notion of the "dark comedy" was more in the Jim Carrey/Ben Stiller realm than the Coen realm. Yeah, yeah--Fargo received several Academy Awards and nominations all around the globe, but the numbers tell a different story: Fargo's U.S. gross ticket sales were less than one-third of what The Cable Guy did. I remember watching entertainment TV shows that year (why, I have no idea) that reported Fargo was the number one movie in only one category--"movie most walked-out-of." In short: the Coens were pushing the envelope in terms of what qualified as a dark comedy in America, and while the critics loved it, the audiences were pushing it back.   

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Fast forward now, to 2009 and A Serious Man. The Coens are now producing Cable Guy grosses (around the 70 million mark) with their now-inimitable, albiet fairly-formulaic, brand of dark comedy. Although No Country for Old Men swept both the box office and every award imaginable from all over the globe, it was more thriller than comedy. Burn After Reading on the other hand--darling of both press and audience alike--was a straight-up Coen kind of comedy and, while compelling, missed the mark. Finally though, A Serious Man hit the nail on the head, cementing the form that they have been developing ever since flirting with it in Raising Arizona.    

The plot is simple enough: it is 1960s Minneapolis and Larry Gopnick--a physics professor at what is presumably University of Minnesota--is experiencing an unraveling. His wife has decided to leave him for a widower friend of the family, his brother has moved into the house with a gambling problem and a boil on his neck, his thirteen year-old son is smoking pot, and he is facing an ever growing number of moral reckonings. To make matters worse, nay, insurmountable for Golpnick is one small detail: he is a harmless, spineless pushover who is just trying to be, you guessed it, serious. So what is a serious Jewish adult to do in the face of an impending existential crisis? Why, see the rabbi, of course.   

It is Golpnick's quest to find answers that makes up the meat of the film. What ensues is a quest for understanding akin to Josef K.'s in The Trial--just when a door seems to open, it is closed (in particular, in fact, in a great scene with the master rabbi and his secretary). The end result can best be described, by describing in turn the Uncertainty Principle: after a long, confusing, and completely absurd amount of work, all we know is that we can know nothing for certain.   

Although the plot seems bleak enough, it is also mundane, and in this we find the true art of the Coens: to make the mundane seem not only bleak, but sufocatingly ominous. The sense of doom present in A Serious Man is almost unbearable at times, and coupled with the almost-ruthless irony, makes the film truly an achievement by both Coen and dark-comic standards alike.    

Yet the greater irony here is in the film's reception so far. The critical response, while always lauding the Coens' spectacularly idiosyncratic cinematic storytelling, is actually one of caution and even in some cases, disapproval. The humor is too ruthless, too inhumane, and too caustic to be enjoyable. The film is simultaneously hilarious and tragic, and I would be lying if I said it didn't hit too close to home. But it is precisely how close it hits as a treatise on human existence--the dearth of anything of real meaning, the sadness of it--which makes it a masterpiece.

By R.A. Schwartz