Commercials and advertisements for this year’s Academy Awards are billing it as historic. Ten nominations for best picture, they say, because 2009 was such an incredible year for film. It’ll go down in the record books, they say. Monumental. I call shenanigans.
Like District Nine, the latest venture from the brothers Coen, A Serious Man, does not belong on the list of this year’s best films.
Now, ordinarily I’m a Coen brothers fan to a fault. I love most of what they do and fall very hard for their film-making style. I love a good bit of black comedy and quaintness. I love Frances McDormand’s character in Fargo: well casted, well directed, well acted. I love just about everything about O Brother Where Art Thou, a flawless film. No Country for Old Men was incredible in just about every way, too. The tension, the ruthlessness was beyond frightening—I couldn’t watch it alone. The Man Who Wasn’t There was a good, interesting piece of film noir, too. But I’m not on board for A Serious Man. To ride a bit on the back of the Olympics I’ll put it this way: it certainly wasn’t a podium finish.
A Serious Man is a film about life: ordinary, boring, meaningless life and if it were made a few years ago I would’ve given it much higher praise. But it wasn’t. Instead, this film lands squarely in the “it’s been done before” category, and doesn’t really stray very far from there.
Like a Douglas Coupland novel—and I’d compare it most closely to All Families Are Psychotic—it follows a protagonist as he tries to find meaning in a life that’s spiraling out of his control. Like a good Coupland novel, the plot centers around collapsing relationships and stressful work/life situations, punctuated by ironic and unexpected events.
The difference with A Serious Man and everything else out there is its Jewishness. The Coen brothers, obviously drawing on their own background, take the traditional “life is meaningless” film and put a spin on it: life is meaningless, even if you’re Jewish. But, like I said, it’s been done before and despite this spin on the traditional tale, it isn’t enough. It comes up short, and while its billed as film noir or a dark comedy I’d call it, instead, mildly entertaining and slightly misguided.
Well, acted, yes. The characters are so plain, and hilarious, bordering on the kind of surreal characterization that I’d expect more from a film-maker like Wes Anderson, and I like that. Ultimately, though, it’s a film about nothing—it’s a film about how meaningless and mundane life is—and to create a film about nothing, that remains interesting to watch, is difficult. I thought, going into it, that if anyone could do it, it’d be Joel and Ethan Coen, but I was wrong. It drags and drags and I know that that’s partly the point but OK, point taken, it’s still boring to watch. But I do get it; I do get what they were trying to do but is it worth a Best Picture nod? I’d say no. It’s a good film, but not a great film and certainly not their best.
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