Sin #39: Religious Ways

It always seemed to me that Catholicism was all about guilt; after all, Christ died for our own sins and the bible is filled with stories about human frailty and weakness. Confession and penitence became means of clemency to a God who happened to change his ways from Old to New Testament, by sanctimoniously punishing or forgiving in accordance to the laws of the prophets who wrote the passages in that holiest of books.

Judaism on the other hand seemed more about taking back. After all, they survived a holocaust that threatened their extermination and some even rose to become the richest men in the world. Their traditions and celebrations always felt a little foreign to me; the Bat Mitzvahs, the Kabala, the appearance of their Rabbis or even their unorthodox ways of mixing Hebrew words. It’s a fascinating doctrine that evolved from centuries of mysticism and wonder.

It’s apparent that the Coen Brothers grew in that world and that they finally made a movie about it with “A Serious Man” which may be their most personal film and the most curious on an amazingly singular series of films. The brothers have always had a strange sense of humor in their movies (“Fargo” was said to be based on a true story which they later said was a playful lie and “O Brother Where are thou?” was said to be based on “The Odyssey”, even though they admitted to never having read the book); here they start with a bizarre and intriguing prologue that may o may not have anything to do with the rest of the movie. In it we learn about a curse that arrives when one is visited by a spirit; can we really trust this story?

The rest of the movie focuses on Larry Gopnik, a physics teacher whose wife is about to leave him for his best friend, a student is trying to blackmail him, and whose brother-in-law recently moved in with him. Even though he suffers a lot of humiliations throughout the movie he remains calm and patient. As a means of therapy he decides to visit a series of Rabbis who don’t offer him much help (one even tells him a baffling dentist story that, again, may not have anything to do with anything).

With “No Country for Old Men” the Coens were criticized with their ambiguous ending (and the unexpected fate of Anton Chigurgh) and once again they leave us baffled with a sudden and unexpected conclusion in “A Serious Man”. It made me smile how the brothers avoid closure and instead leave the audiences to come up with their own thoughts; by doing so they make the movie unforgettable.