INTER FAITH WEEK 2011, DAY 2: FAITHS FILM FESTIVAL

Here are the programme notes I put together for A Serious Man, showing this evening at Phoenix Square as part of the Faiths Film Festival, celebrating Inter Faith Week and helping mark the 25th anniversary of the founding of Leicester Council of Faiths. At least they're drawn from more than one source, which is an improvement on the notes I "put together" for Little Buddha last night.

A SERIOUS MAN (2009) 

Directors Ethan Coen, Joel Coen 

Writers Joel Coen, Ethan Coe

106 min 

Cast Michael Stuhlbarg, Rixchard Kind, Sari Lenick

Plot summary (from Internet Movie Database)

Bloomington, Minnesota, 1967: Jewish physics lecturer Larry Gopnik is a serious and a very put-upon man. His daughter is stealing from him to save up for a nose job,his pot-head son, who gets stoned at his own bar-mitzvah, only wants him round to fix the T.V. aerial and his useless brother Arthur is an unwelcome house guest. But both Arthur and Larry get turfed out into a motel when Larry's wife Judy, who wants a divorce, moves her lover, Sy, into the house and even after Sy's death in a car crash they are still there. With lawyers' bills mounting for his divorce, Arthur's criminal court appearances and a land feud with a neighbour Larry is tempted to take the bribe offered by a student to give him an illegal exam pass mark. And the rabbis he visits for advice only dole out platitudes. Still God moves in mysterious - and not always pleasant - ways, as Larry and his family will find out.

A Serious Man: Coens change tack with masterly fable of a crumbling life (Andrew Pulver, The Guardian, 28 October 2009) 

The Coen brothers may just have made their masterpiece with this, their 14th feature and yet another hairpin-bend change of direction, which has been their trademark for their entire career. 

Two films back they were prowling the Texas badlands in a gruesome tale of blood and revenge in No Country for Old Men; then they turned to weightless farce in the entertaining Burn After Reading.Here they are heading to the suburbia of 1960s midwestern America for an elaborate, slippery, fable that feels, strange as it may sound, like a novel that Saul Bellow or Bernard Malamud never quite got around to writing. 

A Serious Man starts off odd, and gets odder. The first five minutes is entirely in Yiddish, a Coenised version of a shtetl folk-horror tale featuring a bearded old man who may or may not be a dybbuk (wandering spirit). Suffice to say, the Coens don't muck about when it comes to the use of stabbing weapons. 

Then we flip forward from the old country to the new world, to where our protagonist, Larry Gopnik (played by Michael Stuhlbarg) is your archetypal harassed and neurotic Jewish-American college professor.His apparently unimpeachable lifestyle is crumbling rapidly: one of his students is trying to bribe his way through exams, his application for tenure is being undermined by ­ anonymous threatening letters, his deadbeat brother is sleeping on the sofa and attracting the attention of the police, and – this is the killer – his wife is planning to leave him for another man, one of those swinging middle-aged types who embraced the permissive culture with desperate fervency.To offset this Gopnik goes looking for answers from his religion, but unlike Judah Rosenthal in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, he does not come up against the blank wall of a  Godless universe; what he encounters are perplexing rabbis telling him baffling parables that just leave him feeling more and more confused. 

It's this refusal to neatly resolve their narrative that gives A Serious Man its distinctive flavour; it has the same open-ended spirit of The Graduate, an authentic classic of late 60s Jewish-American culture. (A Serious Man could easily have been conceived as a sequel to that film, with Gopnik as a grown-up Benjamin Braddock.) 

The Coens, though, don't quite do deeply felt alienation like anyone else. Despite the opaque story line, their film is a glittering, perfectly honed artifice; but what pushes it into the Coen premier league is the sense that, as with Fargo, there's something very personal going on here. 

It's not autobiographical exactly, but the Minnesota setting is the Coens' own childhood universe, and they revved up for their barmitzvahs at pretty much the same time as Gopnik's son, Danny. The Coens, so normally elusive, have let the mask slip a bit. It's  paid wonderful dividends.

A Serious Man is being shown as part of Phoenix Square’s short season of films with themes or subject matter of religion or belief as part of Inter Faith Week 2011 (being held throughout England, Wales and Northern Ireland, Sunday 20 – Saturday 26 November). Our Faiths Film Festival is being promoted in association with Leicester Council of Faiths, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary during this period.

George M Ballentyne, Equality & Diversity Officer, Leicester Council of Faiths

Number of paying customers for A Serious Man this evening: 28