#106 - A Serious Man (2009)

This was one of the two Coen Brothers movies I missed between the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men and the excellent True Grit revitalization.  It was one of the pictures that was nominated for Best Picture the year the Academy went back to ten Best Picture Nominees.  It was never really a consideration to win (it would not have been nominated had there been only five) but goodness knows that the Coens can do little wrong when it comes to the Academy (and as an ardent fan, I'm okay with this) in much the same way that Christopher Nolan can seem to do little right (though his films have won several Oscars).

Unfortunately for A Serious Man, my favorite part of the film was the first six minutes, which was a cautionary tale in Yiddish about a dybbuk, that seemed to be a short allegory for the rest of the piece as a whole.  The misfortune lies in the fact that that was the most interested I felt in the whole film.  I really didn't understand what was considered so great about it.  Other than Michael Stuhlbarg's performance as the main character, Larry Gopnik, there was little to truly enjoy about the film. 

All the other characters were surprisingly flat: the son is a pot-smoking TV-watcher preparing for his Bar Mitzvah (and every single one of his lines comes from the first two things, basically); the daughter washes her hair, and the wife does very little.  Strangely, I felt as though there was a disconnect between the movie Gopnik was playing in and everyone else was playing in.  If that was the point, then I felt it off-putting, not über-intellectual.  It's certainly one of my least favorite Coen films, if not my absolute least favorite. 

ü