There’s a lot of white noise in the movie theater this week, but that’s to be expected whenever a new Jim Carrey movie comes out. “A Christmas Carol” is one of many mediocre-looking choices from Hollywood opening today, along with “The Box,” “The Fourth Kind” and “The Men Who Stare at Goats.” So let’s turn instead to the Chelsea, to their awesome selection.
I’ve never really thought of the Coen Brothers as explorers of Jewish identity. We all know they do the film adaptation thing, sounding the depths of literary consciousness and mythology and violence yadda yadda…somewhere between a Cormac McCarthy Greek epic and a Homeric transgressive neo-Western. Very clever Mr. and Mr. Coen. Very clever indeed…
“A Serious Man” is the same, and yet it looks startlingly different. One of the biggest complaints you’ll hear about the Coen Brothers’ movies is that their characters aren’t even characters; they’re invariably two-dimensional stand-ins for the oldest clichés and stereotypes of bumpkins and top-level bureaucrats you’ll ever find. You’re never asked to care about them in the least, so that when, for instance, one of them is stuffed in a wood-chipper, it’s a totally painless good-bye.
But “A Serious Man” is the Coen’s loose adaptation of the Book of Job, one of the quintessential tales of human pain and suffering in the Western canon. They simply cannot pull off this movie without developing the main character. The level of communion that one enters into with Job’s soul, reading that book of the Old Testament, is pretty dramatic. There, it is God’s who is accused of not caring about his “characters,” abandoning Job to the whims of the Devil on nothing more than a bet. I don’t think the Coens want to be like God, and I don’t think they will miss the opportunity in their newest film to craft the kind of character needed to do justice to the timeless story.
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