E-Paper
No les miserables
There's a certain obvious logic about utter misery falling on one man being captured in its full horror only through the comic.
A Serious Man
Eagle/Focus Features, Rs 499
Rating: ****
There's a certain obvious logic about utter misery falling on one man being captured in its full horror only through the comic. And yet, even as you laugh at (never with) the central character of the Coen Brothers' study of a man being beaten up by the Fates, the feeling that someone can suffer so much will make your laughter uncomfortable. Larry Gopnik (played with controlled nervousness by Michael Stuhlarg) is a physics professor in 1967 Minnesotta whose wife one day announces that she wants a divorce and remarry another man who happens to be Larry's friend (a respectable, 'serious' man, unlike Larry).
As if things can't get worse, a run-in with a Korean student whom Larry has failed and has tried to bribe him becomes, at least in his mind, connected to his tenureship as professor coming under appraisal. His brother Arthur (Richard King) is slow, but obsessed with scribbling mysterious numbers and signs that supposedly will tie up all natural laws of the universe. Arthur is warned by the police for gambling and later arrested for sodomy (both being illegal in 1967 Minnesota).
Parallel to Larry's tale of existential descent is his son Danny's coming of age story. He smokes pot, swears like a sailor and secretly steals his dad's money to order records (Santana's Abraxas and Creedence Clearwater Revival's Cosmo's Factory) from a record club. In essence, we see two strands of a Jewish American suburban family at a crossroads of history: Larry's world of community at the brink of crumbling and crushing him as a precursor to the apocalypse ahead; and Danny's world of 'everything is possible' that will hit everyone even as small town America still lags behind the Summer of Love and Vietnam.
Joel and Ethan Cohen's brilliant 2010 film may not sound as if it's for everyone, but the nuanced take on a human suffering and the attempt to understand why one is picked for misery is astounding and travels far and wide beyond its 'Jewish', 'American', 'innocence of the 1960s' setting. The special feature of an interview of the producer-director brothers Joel and Ethan. Coen, who first came into the limelight with their 1996 Oscar-winning film Fargo, is a treat. This is brilliant story-telling through brilliant cinema.
