Not as funny as I thought it was going be. The humor was there but on slow boil. No big laugh out loud moments as there were in the much dismissed (by others) Burn After Reading. I have a distain for using a nightmare sequence to interject some illogical humor. There at least three such scenes here. A mostly unknown cast (except for maybe Richard Kind*, Simon Helberg** and Adam Arkin***) and the mostly unknown stage actor, Michael Stuhlbarg, has to carry the film. He wore on me. As his character’s life is falling apart he used maybe two expressions. Weary and exasperated. A Serious Man is also 100% Jewish while trying to be being 100% everyday life. There are stetls, gets, bar mitzvahs, and rabbis galore, which can definitely leave us goys in the dark. There is no way this will be a blockbuster, its delivery and story, won’t be irresistible to the world at large. Burn After Reading, the Coens 2008 comedy, did $60 million. I will wait with interest to see if this year’s effort can top that. [ RT ] [ MC ]
* Many TV roles including 150 episodes of Spin City.
** “Howard Wolowitz” on The Big Bang Theory
*** Many TV roles: Northern Exposure, The West Wing and most recently Life and Sons of Anarchy.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
So, I decided to give “A Serious Man” another chance. I finally started to appreciate and enjoy the so called most mature of the Coen brothers films when I started really paying attention to the spoken word. This really is a great screenplay. Forget the images listen to dialogue. Not that the images aren’t hilarious at moments. Well, maybe not hilarious, but I smiled. But some of the lines were memorable: “F-troop is still fuzzy.” and “I don’t want “Santana-Abraxas”. “I’ve just been in a terrible auto accident”. I have yet to put my top movies of 2009 list together having not seen the most notable of the crop, but if my criteria is the movies that left the greatest impression on me this movie could possibly make my top 20.