A Serious Man (2009) Script Review | #42 WGA 101 Greatest Scripts of the 21st Century
Baffling, funny, and elusive, A Serious Man might be the most spiritual script that the Coen brothers have ever written.
Logline: Larry Gopnik, a Midwestern physics teacher, watches his life unravel over multiple sudden incidents. Though seeking meaning and answers amid his turmoil, he only seems to keep sinking.
Written by: Joel and Ethan Coen
Pages: 136
A Serious Man can be considered a spiritual story, one deeply rooted in the Jewish faith and traditions in which Joel and Ethan Coen were raised. It is the parable of a man besieged by a barrage of troubles and his attempts to make sense of them. But it is the opposite of a ‘religious’ or ‘faith’ story. This is a script that has the Coen brothers’ fingerprints all over it.
The time is 1967, the place is a suburb in Minneapolis. The protagonist is physics professor Larry Gopnik. He has a 16-year-old daughter, Sarah, and a 12-year-old son, Danny. Larry is hoping to secure tenure, which will bring in some much-needed job security. Larry’s troubles begin when a student, Clive, tries to bribe him for a better grade. They only escalate when his wife, Judith, announces that she wants a divorce to be with Sy Ableman and asks him to move out. Bewildered, Larry seeks out rabbis in the hopes of untangling his problems, but they don’t exactly offer him any useful help.
If this sounds as confusing or mysterious as a parable, or doesn’t make sense in any rational kind of way, that might be deliberate. A Serious Man is mysterious. If it has secrets, it doesn’t yield them easily. Trying to parse meaning out of this screenplay is like trying to parse meaning out of folk lore or the Torah. It takes work. Most good scripts function like a well-oiled clock; A Serious Man is more like a central nervous system— tug one wire and something goes off elsewhere.
What is it about? I can’t really say. The closest comparison I can draw is the story of Job, plagued by problem after problem but retaining his faith in God. Except instead of dealing with boils and dead families, poor Larry has to deal with the anxiety of getting tenure, or finding a place to stay along with his socially awkward but brilliant mathematician brother, Arthur.
The seed of A Serious Man began with an early discussion about a short movie about a rabbit that the Coen brothers knew growing up. It would be loosely based on the eldest rabbi (in the script, that character is Marshak, the one Danny goes to see towards the end after the bar mitzvah).
But neither brother knew what happened in that room with the rabbi, or what the conversation between the bar mitzvahed child and the rabbi would be like. Still, this got gears moving. The Coen brothers drew from their own childhood, making the details somewhat quasi-autobiographical. Like Danny, for instance, they’d go to Hebrew school; and just as Larry has to put up with the subtly sociopathic Sy, they too knew someone just like Sy when they were growing up, someone who is “smoothly free of self-doubt”.
One of the first scenes that they wrote was the prologue, in which a Yiddish-speaking wife in 19th century Eastern Europe is horrified that her husband unknowingly invited a dybbuk into their home— an evil spirit. This scene is meant to be a folktale, though one that they wrote. It is never brought up or referenced ever again, yet it sets the entire tone. The way it builds in tension and dread so rapidly is wondrous to behold, and makes you want to ask why the Coen brothers never made a horror movie.
It’s similar to the tactic that Jean-Pierre Melville used in his films, opening his pictures with made-up quotations that established the tone.
Although the script might feel inaccessible, on the surface, Larry has to deal with real problems. How will he deal with Clyde? Will he find a place to live in after Judith kicks him out? How will he deal with Sy? Who is writing anonymous letters to the tenure committee slandering Larry and will it jeopardize his chances of getting tenure? Will Danny get his confiscated Walkman back? Larry is such a passive character that he never will get around to resolving things so much as wait for the universe to sort them out for him; but these problems keep the drama and mystery alive. It’s important, especially if you are writing a story that might be confusing, to have a mystery going. By raising questions in the reader’s mind, one can string along a reader until the end.
At 136 pages, A Serious Man is a funny if baffling screenplay about a man experiencing a multitude of crises, who falls into a hole, and somehow keeps sinking. The universe is plaguing him with problems. Or perhaps it’s God. Who knows? In this script, they could be one and the same.
Notes:
Fresh Air (January 12, 2011) | Coen Bros. On Wet Horses, Kid Stars: It's A Wild West (NPR)
Morgan, David (February 21, 2010) |For Best Picture: “A Serious Man” (CBS News)
Power, Ed (November 19, 2019) | A Serious Man at 10: How the Coen brothers made the most intimate and puzzling film of their careers (The Independent)