The Coens have raised the bar with A Serious Man,
a sledgehammer allegory delivered in a blizzard
of wordplay and imagery so subtle I still don't
know what hit me. Nevertheless, I feel reasonably
comfortable that, in a big way, the film is an
assault upon its intended audience.
As a cine-masochist, I am plum delighted.
A survey of the criticism on imdb suggests three main readings.
1. Political--ASM is a biting take on the foibles
of a Hebraic tradition that has become
hollow—equated textually to the erosion of the American Dream.
>2. Postmodern--The movie is a loving send-up of
the same tradition. A moral fable, wherein the
existential conundrum is absolved through the
proper apprehension of Love and its purported
source, Hashem. A fancy turn on the axiomatic
'God is Love', built upon a Kafkaesque reading of the Book of Job.
3. Magical--A parabolic parable upon the nature of uncertainty.
A Serious Man is all of these, I reckon, and
more. At once an apparently impossible riddle or
Gordian Knot, an emo one-liner and a sort of
magic trick, complete with a dazzling punch
provided by the use of in situ music by Jefferson
Airplane. So to start us off, we have three solid
interps, which taken together ought to provide
enough fodder for a good variety of critique and analysis well into the future.
But I deduce another and much tougher meaning. A
Serious Man is a message, loud and clear and in
no uncertain terms: there is a God and he is
fucking pissed-off. See, folks have pretty much
given up on him, Hashem, God, though some don't
know it or won't admit it. The Coens take serious
lengths to establish Hashem's unique problems,
going so far as to a hint of his ultimate identity.
<http://metaphilm.com/index.php/detail/a-serious-man/>Link
--
Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2010/03/serious-man-there-is-god-and-he-is.htm>monochrom
at 3/08/2010 01:03:00 PM
