BEFORE: This Richard Kind trilogy comes to an end today as he carries over from "The Last Laugh", but it leads right in to the Timothee Chalamet trilogy that's been re-scheduled from April. This has really been the year of the re-schedule in many ways, I had three animated films from January that found a new home in May, and now I'm re-scheduling "The Laundromat" for July, where I think it will play a key role. To some degree this is always on-going, like any romance or horror films I don't get to each October or February just roll over - and really, every movie on the list rolls over every day I don't get to it, but there really have been some KEY re-schedulings this year. Tomorrow's film is not just a re-schedule from April, but it's been re-scheduled at least twice, I think I had plans to watch it next to "Lady Bird" in 2018, and that didn't work out because an Academy screener wouldn't play. So it went back on the watchlist, to slowly rise to the top again. That film finally gets another chance tomorrow.
But I've reached the halfway point for 2020, the year that for many reasons, can't end soon enough. Strangely, though the end of the year is already in sight, mathematically at least. I've got a path that gets me to the end of July, thanks to my recently tacked-on documentary chain for the year. Figure June, July and the pre-programmed October are 30 days each, that's 90 slots out of the second 150 that are already filled! Just 60 left to program, and that's just 20% of 2020's 300 slots! So if I stick to my schedule, I'm 80% of the way there! Now, there's a bit more work that needs to be done, I still need to link from the last documentary to the first film in the horror chain, but given how many options I have, I should be able to come up with a path that takes (ideally) from 45 to 50 steps, so I'll have some room to play with in November/December, maybe work in a holiday film. That's all that stands between me and another Perfect Year, well, that and Frank Welker's uncredited leopard/panther noises.
THE PLOT: Larry Gopnik, a Midwestern physics teacher, watches his life unravel over multiple sudden incidents. Though seeking meaning and answers amidst his turmoils, he seems to keep sinking.
AFTER: You don't have to be Jewish to get this film, but it might help. It couldn't hurt. The difference between the religions was highlighted for me earlier this week in a comedy special, when Lewis Black told Christians that they really should stop reading the Old Testament. ("That's OUR book!", he yelled. Christians get the "new" Testament with the kinder, gentler God, and started calling that other part of the Bible the "old" part. Very forward of them.). I guess collectively we create the religion that's going to meet our needs and help us get through the day, even if we don't realize that's what we're doing. It's true, Christians don't really deal with a vengeful God very well, just look at how the evangelicals have blamed hurricanes on the acceptance of homosexuality, or similar misinterpretations of cause and effect. Just because there's something out there in the world that YOU don't like, and then a disaster or tragedy happens, that does not mean that the two headlines are related.
So what am I to make of the trials and tribulations of a physics professor in the 1960's who's dealing with a lot of problems in his personal life? His wife has been seeing another man and is asking him for a "get", a ritualistic divorce that will enable her to get re-married within the faith, and his screwed-up brother who's working on some kind of universal math probability formula has moved in with him, and he seems to always be in the bathroom draining a cyst (you get one guess regarding which role's played by Richard Kind). His son's in trouble at school, doing drugs and always complaining about the TV antenna getting poor reception, his daughter's always going out with her friends, he's up for tenure at the college in a couple weeks, but somebody's sending anonymous letters to the school administration accusing him of committing lurid acts, and one Korean student who's failing his class is trying to bribe him for a passing grade.
It's a lot to deal with, and of course it brings to mind the Book of Job. And it's not my first movie this year to do so, remember "The Tree of Life"? It seems some screenwriters just love putting their characters under great quantities of pressure, as if they're lumps of coal that may turn into diamonds, given enough pressure and time. Umm, it doesn't always happen, but I acknowledge the technique. There's also the angle I've noticed where many of the tragic or stressful events that befall the main character come from somebody's real life, whether that's a stand-up comic or Louisa May Alcott, personal experience often seems to be one of the strongest inspirations. Sometimes it's just a matter of figuring out WHO some of these things happened to in the real world, and that person's connection to a film's writer or director, in order to gain a little insight. So, was this a very personal film for the Coen Brothers to make, and if so, why does this one seem to be part of their minor arcana, and not mentioned with the same reverence as "Raising Arizona", "Fargo", "The Big Lebowski", or even "O Brother, Where Art Thou"?
Sure, the Coens were raised in a Jewish household in a suburb of Minneapolis, and their father was a college professor, but in economics, not physics. As for any problems in the relationship between their parents, there doesn't seem to be much information available. But perhaps this is a pastiche about growing up Jewish in America, and draws from many stories and sources, and not actual events. There are a couple stories here told by rabbis that come off like modern-day parables, the film even opens with one about a dybbuk, which is a malicious spirit that may be the dislocated soul of a dead person, inhabiting a new body in order to accomplish some goal in the human world. (I had to look this one up.). But it's hard to say exactly what connection the opening dybbuk parable has to the main story. Is there a dybbuk that's visiting Larry Gopnik's life, causing all his problems? If so, who is it - Uncle Arthur? Sy Ableman? That Korean student?
I'm also struggling with a few other things - who is the "Serious Man" referred to in the title - is it Larry himself? Or is it Sy Ableman, who was called a "serious man" at one point, and he also calls himself one in Larry's dream about him. We see a few of Larry's stress dreams during this film, only they're not revealed to BE dreams at first, so each time the audience thinks those events are real, at least until they see Larry waking up with a start. Yeah, they pulled this trick a few too many times here, kind of like somebody else did in "We Don't Belong Here". If you go back to this well too many times it starts to create the feeling that maybe nothing is real, like this is a fiction film created by a couple of writers and directors. Which it IS, of course, only I'd rather not be aware of that during the course of the film. Hey, maybe there is no reality, and I'm just a character in somebody else's film. Well, I am sitting in front of a computer typing right now, and that's something you see all the time in the movies. So there you go, nothing's real and I don't exist, the end.
Larry references the physics problems of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and also Schrodinger's Cat, which is kind of like a parable on its own. If you don't know it, it's a thought experiment where a cat is placed in a box with a container of deadly poison gas, and a radioactive material that emits particles on a semi-regular timed basis, so within a certain period of time, one would expect that material to release a particle, break the container of gas, and kill the cat. But until you open the box to check on the health of the cat, one might say the cat is neither alive nor dead, and this illustrates the quantum nature of certain particles, which are neither one thing nor the other until you examine them. Larry's problem with the Korean student is that he understands the physics, but not the math that supports them, while Larry maintains that if you don't understand math, then you can't understand physics. NITPICK POINT here, I wasn't aware that there was any math problem associated with the Schrodinger's cat problem, plus - an Asian kid that can't do math? Seems a bit unlikely.
Larry makes it clear to the student - actions have consequences. You can't bribe your physics teacher and expect there to not be consequences. Is this the message of the film? I'm not sure. There are consequences all over the place - Larry has his brother move in, there are consequences. Larry's wife starts dating Sy, there are consequences. Larry's son listens to Jefferson Airplane during class, and this sets off a bunch of consequences. There's a bit with the Columbia Record Club, which Larry's son joined at some point, and there are consquences - a bill collector starts calling Larry at work, asking him to pay for Santana's "Abraxas" album, which was the selection of the month, and Larry knows nothing about ordering this album, or joining the record club in the first place.
Let me back up a bit, because this may give some insight about the relationship between actions and consequences. This was a real record club that you could join back in the 1960's to, umm, late 1980's? I fell for this "scam" myself at some point - for 1 cent you could join the Columbia Record (and Tape?) club, and you'd get 10 or 12 albums of your choice for that penny. Great deal, right? Only when you joined the club, you'd automatically get the album of the month mailed to you, at full retail price plus shipping and handling, unless you specifically mailed back the little reply card saying that you DIDN'T want this month's selection. You could choose to order nothing that month, or get some cassettes or CDs that were NOT the main selection, but the burden was on the customer to reply in time to STOP the automatic shipment if they didn't want that album. Because there was such a tight window, this often meant that if you didn't reply when you first got the card, you'd get stuck with paying for an album you didn't want. Oh, sure, there was a return policy, but that meant paying for postage to mail it back - if I was a bit late returning that reply card, I found it was easier to just dump the package back in a mailbox when it arrived, because once it was opened the post office was less likely to honor a "return to sender" request, even though it came in a postage-paid box.
So from this new propoesed "Columbia Record Club" physics thought experiment, we learn that not only do actions have consequences, but also INACTIONS have consequences. Wow, this is a revelation, seriously. You can affect the future by doing NOTHING sometimes - so maybe Larry's marriage was crumbling due to some kind of inaction on his part, or his kids were out of control due to some lack of attention or supervision. (In a Jewish household? Again, not likely.) And though I can't prove it just yet, the next most logical assumption is that sometimes actions and consequences are not related at all. We can, again very coincidentally, apply this reasoning to the current pandemic. Somebody in Wuhan province sells a bat in a meat market, and a virus starts to spread. People get sick, they go about their business, they interact with each other, and they spread the disease. Actions have consequences.
Other people in other parts of the world hear the news, and they fail to properly set up systems that would detect and trace the disease. They fail to stock up on personal protective equipment, they fail to put any systems in place at the airport to scan passengers arriving from other countries. Nobody thinks it can happen here, so they don't enact policies for social distancing and wearing face-masks until the pandemic is right in their backyard. So, inactions have consequences. And now we're headed into the unknown again by re-opening businesses and setting timetables for getting things like beaches, casinos, malls and theme parks back to normal, as if the virus is on our call-list and willing to adhere to our schedule, which is just ridiculous. We can't see the virus, you dunderheads, so there will be no way of knowing which of our actions, if any, are being effective and which aren't. There's going to be this enormous gray area after people start socializing again - like "I went to the beach and I didn't wear a face-mask, and I didn't get sick, so therefore I don't need a mask any more." Which would be a fine example of fuzzy logic not working very well. Past performance is just not a good enough indicator of future results.
Actions have consequences. Inactions have other consequences. And sometimes, actions and consequences are not related at all, but our minds conflate them when they appear to happen in sequence or in close proximity. Larry has a car accident. Sy also has a car accident, on the same day at the same time but in a different location. One man is fine, the other man is injured. What's the connection? Possibly none at all, other than the fact that I mentioned them in the same sentence, and then by asking "What's the connection?" I implied that there WAS one. And maybe that's how religion works. If you follow the rules, be excellent to each other, you may get rewarded in the next world - or maybe not, nobody really knows for sure. One way of thinking says your afterlife is going to be super-duper, another way of thinking is that you'll be just as dead and gone as the next guy. Congratulations, you are Schrodinger's Cat, only nobody's going to be opening up the box to check on you.
But still, there's the message that being neighborly is particularly relevant during these troubled times. After we make sure that we're each healthy and we have what we need to get by, it's a good time to check in on someone else, and get them what they need if you can. Volunteer, donate blood, donate food or just your time, in addition to being a mitzvah it will give you something to do to help pass the time. Don't even think about the next world, because there are people right here in this one that need some help now. Will it help you to help others? Well, it couldn't hurt. (unless you forget to wear your facemask. Stay safe.)
Also starring Michael Stuhlbarg (last seen in "The Shape of Water"), Sari Lennick (last seen in "Café Society"), Fred Melamed (last seen in "The Spy Who Dumped Me"), Aaron Wolff, Jessica McManus, Alan Mandell (last seen in "Velvet Buzzsaw"), Adam Arkin (last seen in "Hitch"), George Wyner (last seen in "The Long Goodbye"), Amy Landecker (last seen in "Bombshell"), Katherine Borowitz, Allen Lewis Rickman (last seen in "You Don't Know Jack"), Yelena Shmulenson, Fyvush Finkel (last seen in "If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast"), Simon Helberg (last seen in "Florence Foster Jenkins"), Michael Lerner (last seen in "The Postman Always Rings Twice"), David Kang, Steve Park (last seen in "Phil Spector"), Ari Hoptman, Peter Breitmayer (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them"), Jon Kaminski Jr.
RATING: 5 out of 10 mezuzahs
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