A Serious Man

Of Few Days, and Full of Trouble

2009 // USA // Joel and Ethan Coen // October 29, 2009 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

A - Is it even conceivably a coincidence that A Serious Man, which draws more candidly from the autobiographical outlines of Joel and Ethan Coen than any of their films to date, is also one of their most desolate and sobering meditations on human suffering? The film brims with mordant wit and a plethora of grotesque, wretchedly amusing characters, but it doesn't aspire to be a black comedy-of-errors in the mold of Burn After Reading. Rather, the Coens have delivered a work of spiritual and mortal terror that manages to be both absurd and disquieting, a much closer relation to Barton Fink and No Country For Old Men than any of the brothers' screwball pleasures. In the hands of the Coens, the tribulations of a Jewish professor in 1967 suburbia become the stuff of hoary musings on misfortune, culpability, and the seeming uncaring cruelty of God. Make no mistake: A Serious Man is a miserable film. It's also an exquisite example of the Coens' unparalleled talent for blending the grim and the droll into a bewitching cinematic gestalt.

The film opens with a fable: in a snowbound shetl—the year is never specified, but the environs look appropriately Tsarist—a husband and wife quarrel about an esteemed rabbi (Fyvush Finkel) that the husband has met along the road and invited home. The wife maintains that the rabbi has been dead for three days, and that her husband has unwittingly brought a malevolent spirit, a dybbuk, into their household. The husband sees only a friendly and respected old man, and desperately attempts to paper over his wife's anxiety; she perceives an emissary of misfortune and resolves to act accordingly. The connection between this prologue and the primary story is not apparent at the outset, but the Coens repeatedly allude to its themes: the different ways of perceiving adversity and the different strategies for dealing with it.

We then journey from the Old World to the New, as the Coens usher us into the life of Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor at an unspecified Midwestern college where the tumultuous 1960s haven't quite alighted yet. Larry's life is hardly unbearable, but it is filled with indignities. Most conspicuous are his ungrateful kids, a menacing thick-necked Gentile neighbor, and his unemployed brother Arthur (Richard Kind, perfectly cast) who is sleeping on the couch and monopolizing the bathroom with his cyst-draining rituals. Still, Larry is devoted to his job and his family, and while he isn't especially observant in the faith, he believes he has a good handle on what it means to be a moral person. When a flunking Korean-American student (David Kang) turns up to haltingly appeal for a passing grade, Larry painstakingly explains why this would not be fair to the other students. This doesn't deter the young man from passing Larry a bribe that he discovers only later.

It is roughly at this point that cracks begin to proliferate throughout poor Larry's life. While some are fresh calamities, others have been forming for some time, unbeknown to Larry. His wife Judith (Seri Lennick) suddenly confesses her "friendship" with a local widower, Sy (Fred Melamed), and demands a divorce—for no apparent reason other than her boredom with Larry. For his part, the verbose and peculiar Sy is disturbingly affable about the whole thing, as though being Larry's pal were more important than bedding his wife. Larry puts up a weak protest, but soon finds himself living out of the local fleabag motor lodge. Things get worse. Arthur, who is likely mentally ill, runs afoul of the law. Larry's teenage son and daughter may be stealing money, to fund their marijuana purchases and nose job, respectively. Someone has been writing anonymous letters to torpedo Larry's application for tenure. His divorce lawyer's fees are piling up. He gets in a car accident. A collector from a record club won't stop calling him at work. To add insult to injury, the housewife next door, Mrs. Samsky (Amy Landecker), has taken to sunbathing nude. Larry's son, Danny (Aaron Wolff), meanwhile, contends with his own problems: a confiscated transistor radio, a hulking drug-dealer to whom he owes money, and a looming bar mitzvah. (The record he uses to practice the Hebrew cant serves as a soundtrack to the crumbling of the Gopnik household.)

One of the little strokes of genius in A Serious Man is that while Larry is bookish and a tad fretful in the way one envisions a Midwestern Jewish academic would be, he isn't a nebbishy caricature. Thus, when it begins to seem as though God is smacking him around out of sheer malice, his progressively hysterical state scans as authentic distress, rather than the overreaction of a neurotic. In his desperation, Larry eventually turns to the synagogue, and seeks the wisdom of three separate rabbis, none of whom prove to be much use. Rabbi Scott (Simon Helberg) spouts airy pabulum; Rabbi Nachtner (George Wyner) offers only chuckles and a bizarre anecdote; and the venerable Rabbi Marshak (Alan Mandell) won't even see him.

There are echoes of the biblical tale of Job in Larry's plight, but the resemblance is only passing. Larry is hardly the most reverential man in his community, and while the book of Job is focused as much on God and dialectics as the man himself, the Coens' film is most assiduously about Larry's travails. Although the American Jewish experience provides the backdrop for the film's explorations of personal and theological despair, A Serious Man is a marvelously universal work, one that any filmgoer should be able to relate to. It is about that nagging question that presents itself whenever life takes a steaming crap on us: Why is this happening to me? In other words, A Serious Man is, at bottom, the Coens' theodicy film, a religious companion to No Country's pitiless confrontation of ethics and justice in a post-faith world.

Yet the Coens, resisting some of the shallow mirth that characterized Burn After Reading, have deeper ambitions than mere goggling at the awfulness of life. Larry's mantra of protest—"I didn't do anything!"—operates under the flawed assumption that the world follows crude karmic logic, where every calamity must necessarily have a corresponding sin at its root. Sometimes shit just happens. On the other hand, Larry's blamelessness is not so clear. His lament can also be read as "I didn't do anything!," which is an apt description of his approach to life. Larry has spent his adulthood coasting, blind to the forces that are slipping past him and arraying themselves against him. His existence is characterized by inertia. The dybbuk of the prologue is evoked explicitly when a dead man begins to torment Larry's dreams, but also more subtly by his repeated lament. The evil spirit, it is explained, appears when living relations fails to sit shiva for the deceased. Misfortune therefore results from a sin of omission, from "not doing anything." In this the Coens establish a somewhat provocative moral order, where the mere act of being an oblivious doormat is a kind of sin that invites doom. On the other other hand, sometimes shit just happens.

It's a testament to the Coens' talent that it now seems perfunctory to acknowledge that, aesthetically speaking, their latest film is nearly pitch-perfect, a paradoxical pleasure given Larry's wretched misfortunes. The performances all shine, but Stuhlbarg is the fulcrum, and as Larry he skillfully conveys the sense of a man in free-fall, flailing for any handhold that presents itself. Longtime collaborator and cinematographic virtuoso Roger Deakins provides the kind of lensing to the Coens' vision that is all the more remarkable for the breathtaking consistency of its excellence, dead-on and mesmerizing down to the final image. And what an ending A Serious Man boasts! The naysayers who groused over No Country's sudden and deeply affecting cut to black will likely be perplexed again. The Coens cross-cut across scenes where calamity suddenly looms over two separate characters, one who senses with gnawing horror what is approaching, the other oblivious to his peril until it may be too late. We don't know what comes next. Except that someone will ask, "Why me?"

Paranormal Activity

Things That Go Bump

2007 // USA // Oren Peli // October 27, 2009 // Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

C+ - Ever since The Blair Witch Project slithered into theaters in 1999 to become the most profitable movie of all time, audiences have been periodically subjected to horror films that attempt to replicate various aspects of its formula, evidently with the hope that this will lead to a similar windfall. The staggering hype and backlash that attended Blair Witch's somewhat unexpected success—not to mention a subsequent decade of dispiriting decline in horror cinema—seem to have obscured an obvious truth. Namely, that much of the attention surrounding Blair Witch was driven by its astonishingly slick marketing campaign, one that gave viewers the impression that a fictional film was comprised of authentic found footage. The problem, of course, is that the public can theoretically be punked only once, and for this reason alone Blair Witch would seem to be a once-in-a-lifetime sort of phenomenon. Granted, there have been some satisfyingly scary attempts to rebottle the lightning, most notably the Spanish zombie thriller [•REC], but there seems to be little likelihood of a Blair Witch successor emerging when the original so ruthlessly exploited (and demolished) the credulity of contemporary horror film-goers.

Nonetheless, this hasn't deterred enthusiastic boosters from bestowing that dubious honorific on a little ghost story entitled Paranormal Activity. And I do mean little. Writer-director Oren Peli, shooting the entire film in his own house on a notoriously anemic budget of $15,000, has doubled-down on the notion that a horror movie doesn't have to be grandiose, polished, or even artful to be frightening (and I mean that in the best possible way). With a video camera, two actors, one location, and a few post-production flourishes, Peli delivers a post-Blair Witch take on the familiar haunted house scenario. With these limitations in mind, I'm inclined to be generous when assessing a film like Paranormal Activity, which is essentially a horror movie at its most elemental, a contraption designed to evoke terror. Only one question truly matters: Is it scary? The honest answer is, "Not really, but..."

In one of the film's fresher twists, we enter the story of Paranormal Activity after the spooky stuff has already been underway for some indeterminate amount of time. Micah (Micah Sloat) has just purchased a high-end digital video camera, complete with a night-vision setting, for the express purpose of documenting the odd goings-on that have been plaguing the suburban San Diego house that he and girlfriend Katie (Katie Featherstone) share. Initially, these phenomena are nothing more than weird noises that emanate from somewhere in the house, but this is sufficient to provoke Katie's anxiety and Micah's curiosity. Determined to prove or disprove the supernatural character of the strange occurrences, Micah begins carrying the camera everywhere and documenting everything. Most conspicuously, every night he mounts it on a tripod in the bedroom and switches on the night vision setting, in order capture anything unusual that might happen while he and Katie slumber.

Peli takes his time to lay the groundwork for the frightening stuff, dwelling on banalities early in the film in order to establish the layout of the house and sketch just enough of Katie and Micah's personalities so that he can put the screws to their outwardly solid relationship. The film portions out the morsels of creepiness very, very slowly, and they are initially so subtle that they almost seem like non-events. The first supernatural occurrence that the audience witnesses on Micah's camera is a rumbling sound that persists for a few seconds while the couple sleeps. That's it. The disturbances progress from there: sheets rustle, a door moves a few inches, a lamp sways, a shadow flickers across a wall. These occurrences aren't so much frightening as they are unsettling, partly because of the film's unvarnished visual style, and partly because it's so easy to imagine the weird things that might go on in our darkened bedrooms as we slumber.

Although Katie and Micah respond differently to the ghostly phenomena, neither one of them fits precisely into the Believer or Skeptic archetype that are staples of the genre. Katie is uneasy, reproachful, and eager to be rid of the entity has taken up residence in their house. For Micah, meanwhile, whatever fear the disturbances evoke in him is less potent than his urge to study them, and perhaps to understand what the intruding presence wants. Katie has her suspicions about that. Early in the film, she brings a psychic (Mark Fredrichs) to the house for a consultation, and she confesses that these phenomena have been following her since she was eight years old. Without much evidence at all, the psychic explains that Katie and Micah are being terrorized not by the departed soul of a human, but a demonic spirit bent on destruction. Peli doesn't devote too much time developing a mythology for his tale or even attempting to rationalize the strangeness, preferring to chalk up Katie's malevolent hanger-on to one of the universe's random cruelties. He does, however, connect it to her tale of a childhood fire, and adeptly calls back to this bit of history with a couple of downright haunting details.

The fundamental flaw that bedevils Paranormal Activity is that isn't particularly scary, which is troublesome in a horror film whose entire gimmick is its realistic aesthetic, one designed to trick the viewer into believing that its events actually happened. Peli exhibits admirable patience in maintaining a deliberate pace throughout the film, but at times this does a disservice to the film's mood, especially in the third act. Paranormal Activity begs for a narrative that plays out like the smooth tightening of a vice, but instead it just plods along, betraying Peli's lack of authorial sophistication. The disturbances caught by Micah's camera intensify over the course of the film, and while in the moment they are often gooseflesh-inducing, there is a disappointing lack of tension to the overarching story. Perhaps it's just that the found footage conceit has officially passed its sell-by date, but Paranormal Activity isn't especially convincing as a narrative. It doesn't help that the film concludes with a scene that proves neither enlightening nor shocking, with a dollop of creepshow gore that seems out of place amid the film's tone of slow-burn doom. (Certainly, the contrast to Blair Witch, whose most horrifying visual is simply a man standing in a corner, is not favorable.) Paranormal Activity's most enduring moment occurs earlier, when Peli offers a harrowing vision of a childhood nightmare: a sleeper snatched by the ankles and dragged screaming and clawing in vain from their bed into the hungry darkness.

Zombieland

These Rules Are For Your Own Safety, People

USA // 2009 // Ruben Fleischer // October 8, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B - In the wake of Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead, a film that managed to be both achingly funny and rather vicious, it was probably a safe bet that another genuinely imaginative zombie horror-comedy would be a long time coming. Happily, a scant five years later, Ruben Fleischer, in his assured feature film debut, delivers a zombie film that should make any aficionado of the genre stand up and whoop with delight. There's nothing particularly artful about Zombieland, which is exactly the creature it appears to be, no more, no less: the comical tale of a group of ragtag survivors at the end of world. Is it unambitious? Certainly. It's also damn funny and even occasionally exhilarating, if only as an example of film-makers uncovering fresh meat in a horror scenario nearly drained of its power by direct-to-DVD mediocrity. Screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who wet their beaks in television, don't go looking for a new wrinkle to add to the zombie film's now well-establish parameters. Instead, they change the angle of their approach, throwing their sympathy behind the misfits for whom life in undead America isn't an especially difficult adjustment.

Our narrator for this little jaunt through the post-Zombocalypse U.S. is known only by the name of his hometown, Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg). A self-effacing dork who admits he spent his pre-zombie life playing World of Warcraft and guzzling Mountain Dew, Columbus is one of America's last breathing humans. He's not the most likely survivor, but his personality traits have kept him among the living: he's naturally wary, utterly lacking in sentimentality, comfortable with loneliness, and, most importantly, compulsive. Columbus has a list of rules for survival in the land of the dead, you see, and in what is easily the film's most enjoyable flourish, he explains them with voiceover narration, animated text, and concrete examples. Rule # 1: Cardio. (Develop your stamina, as the fatties were the first to get caught, bitten, and turned). Rule #2: Douple Tap. (Always finish a zombie off with a second shot.) And so on.

Columbus eventually joins up with Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), who is a tall drink of southern-fried orneriness most of the time, except when he's whacking zombies, and then he turns downright gleeful. The pair then quickly fall in with Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), a pair of ruthless, sweet-as-sugar grifters who somehow manage flawless hair and makeup even in the aftermath of civilization. Fleischer and his performers maintain a sense of rumpled sympathy for each of these four principals, keeping both the characters' essential humanity as well as their frustrating flaws close to the surface. In contrast to most zombie films, no shifty traitor or natural victim emerges within the group. All four are dead serious about surviving, and while they are suspicious and hardened by life in Zombieland, none of them are Bad People. Fleischer primes us to share the elation of their victories, even when those victories are as simple as living to see another dawn or the sweet pleasure of an unspoiled Twinkie. (Rule #31: Enjoy the Little Things.)

On the horror-comedy spectrum, Zombieland is tilted decisively toward the comedy end of things. Fleischer doesn't strike the same exquisite balance of wit, pathos, and grisly terror that Shaun achieved, but that's perfectly acceptable, since he isn't aiming for it. Zombieland is most concerned with the funny, and on that score it acquits itself nicely. (The film's only significant moment of poignant, despairing horror proves to be a clever fake-out.) The writing is sharp and pleasurable without coming off as excessively droll given the ghastly circumstances, and the film gets plenty of mileage out of the essential absurdity of zombie film tropes. There may be a saturation point where zombies getting smacked with car doors stops being an inherently ticklish sight, but I don't believe we've reached it yet. The film-makers wisely keep the self-aware preciousness to a minimum, and while Zombieland assumes that you've seen your share of zombie films before, the characters don't speak openly of the genre's conventions. Columbus and his allies don't know they're in a zombie film. Rather, they seem to be wandering through the backlots of higher profile zombie films, codifying the rules of engagement that the characters of those other films should be following, if they were smart.

Eisenberg, who has often been unfavorably compared to Michael Cera, emerges as a smart casting choice. His awkwardness isn't particularly charming, but as a narrator his observations sound like the wisdom of a kid who's been kicked around the block more than once, and his criticisms of himself and his companions have real bite. Harrelson demonstrates that his best comedic niche is a gentle parody of a drawling tough guy, whom we don't mind cheering when he kicks ass and snickering at when he deserves it. While Stone and Breslin aren't as memorable, they adeptly sell the thick slathering of feminine swagger that Wichita and Little Rock sling around, whether of the lithe Bad Girl variety (Stone) or no-nonsense preteen pluck (Breslin).

Which leads me to the film's most aggravating problem: the complete abandonment of the reasonably equal footing it gives to its male and female leads in the third act, in favor of an old-fashioned damsel-in-distress rescue mission. It's not just the presence of this contrived twist that annoys. It's the fact that it's predicated on Wichita and Little Rock making an unbelievably stupid decision with virtually no thought to the consequences. In other words, it's a glaringly unrealistic and insulting plot development, given that these young women have been surviving by their wits for untold months in the zombie wastelands of America. It doesn't help that this coincides with Zombieland's stumble into that unfortunately common trap for all modern comedies: the lethal loss of narrative steam in the third act, which runs a little too long for its own good. Fleischer loses his way somewhat at this point, and his marvelously entertaining zombie comedy becomes a routine zombie actioner. The tone of the film has already established that nothing truly tragic is going to happen before the credits roll, so it's strictly a matter of waiting for the heroes to pull off their escape, however they manage it. Unfortunately, action without tension leads to tedium, and while Woody Harrelson mowing down zombies with pistols blazing is at least cursorily entertaining, it feels like a downshift from the engaging humor that predominates elsewhere in the film.

These complaints aside, however, Zombieland is an almost shamefully pleasurable ride, especially if, like me, you have an unreasonable affection for all things zombie-related, and perhaps even if you don't. Fleischer delivers the sort of slick entertainment that gives slick entertainment a good name, a gratifying and gleeful slice of adult storytime that is worth every penny of that multiplex ticket.

Julia

2008 // France - USA // Erick Zonca // October 11, 2009 // DVD - Magnolia (2009)

C - Erick Zonca's Julia confirms that Tilda Swinton is an actor of the finest stripe, a woman who can elevate even a sprawling mess of a thriller into something exceedingly watchable. Swinton disappears into the skin of the Los Angeles party girl of the title, a prickly, forty-something alcoholic with bottomless reserves of cynicism. Unemployed and desperate, Julia latches onto a kidnapping scheme so ludicrous it has no chance of success. However, Zonca and his co-writers seem to recognize as much, in that the plan goes to shit almost instantly. Thereafter, Julia is a marathon chase film, where things seem to go from bad to worse to completely bollixed. This cascade of misfortune is due primarily to Julia's relentless stupidity and cowardice, which admittedly makes it hard to give a damn about her. The film doesn't earn its clumsy gestures of sympathy for her or the eventual tenderness between captor and hostage. Swinton still manages to engage with her stammering vulnerability and undercurrent of ruthless swagger, but the film falters despite her. The final eighty (!) minutes comprise an aimless, exasperating string of scenes, lacking the necessary emotional propulsion.

Observe and Report

2009 // USA // Jody Hill // October 7, 2009 // DVD - Warner Brothers (2009)

B- - Had it portrayed Seth Rogen's mall security guard, Ronnie Barnhardt, as a mere ridiculed sad-sack with an inflated sense of self-importance, Observe and Report might have been a much more forgettable feature, and also less problematic. Director Jody Hill and Rogen both deserve audacity points for constructing a pitch-black comedy around a protagonist who is a violent, racist, megalomaniacal date rapist. And, indeed, most of the film's distinctly uneasy laughs work because of Rogen's fearless embrace of an appalling character, one so repugnant that his cluelessness engenders no sympathy. Both Hill's dialog and Rogen's delivery are brilliant stuff, yet I hesitate to label Observe "entertaining." Like Burn After Reading, this is an unpleasant story about unpleasant people doing unpleasant things, and it will undoubtedly not be everyone's cup of tea. Alas, Hill lacks the Coens' aesthetic mastery and their nose for cosmic absurdity. While Observe succeeds as an exhilarating prodding of comedic boundaries, flabbiness creeps into the story as the film wears on, and Ronnie's erratic demeanor alone can't energize the proceedings. Moreover, one is left wondering what Hill's intentions were, particularly when Observe concludes with the contemptible Ronnie "winning" (in a fashion) and getting the girl.

The Baader-Meinhof Complex

2008 // Germany // Uli Edel // September 29, 2009 // Theatrical Print

C+ - Uli Edel's blood-spattered marathon retelling of the Red Army Faction's rise and fall succeeds at establishing a fitting mood of social disintegration and open intra-cultural warfare. Feverishly tearing through two decades of history while piling on endless, brutal setpieces, The Baader-Meinhof Complex foregrounds thrills and atmosphere, while neglecting character and context. Writer Bernd Eichinger, who scribed the captivating Downfall, at least acknowledges the notion that the RAF was the ugly endpoint of the post-Nazi generation's recoil from fascism. The violent radicals depicted in Complex, however, are caricatures of unquenchable rage, not the best proxies for psychological delvings or an exploration of the origins of revolutionary zeal in affluent societies.  What Edel delivers is a relentless film that works primarily as grim entertainment, albeit one that non-Germans may have difficult absorbing, as the historical arcana come fast and furious. Yet even as a depiction of revolution as process, Complex falls far short of last year's mesmerizing Che, which was both more artistically daring and more coherent. While Edel is adept at conjuring the madhouse spirit of the RAF's murderous glory days, Complex is undemanding globetrotting drama at bottom, a grueling thriller with a dash of chilly Teutonic style.