Somehow, I had until yesterday avoided ever seeing A Serious Man, the movie usually described as "the Coen brothers' 2009 black comedy," as opposed to, say, Fargo, a movie I've watched several times and which is usually described as "the Coen brothers' 1996 black comedy." I vaguely remember renting A Serious Man once and beginning to watch it in bed one night before falling asleep around the time the Korean kid tries to bribe the physics professor. When I watched the whole thing on Netflix the other night, it seemed sort of familiar up to that point.
Now that I think of it, the bribe theme is another link between these two black comedies set and filmed here in the Twin Cities. In Fargo, the master criminal plot goes awry when the bad guys are pulled over by a state trooper who notices some flaw with their vehicle's registration tags. When the driver (Steve Buscemi) retrieves his license from his wallet, he also raises the corner of a $50-dollar bill above the wallet's edge and says to the trooper, "Can't we take care of this right here, in Fargo?" Things go south from there.
Compared to Fargo, A Serious Man seems pitiless. The bribe, for example, works--an F gets changed to a C-, the professor adding the minus, with the camera zoomed on his grade book, in a determined, comical, pathetic gesture toward integrity. There is no Marge Gunderson, efficient, intelligent, humane and unassuming, on the case. No one's on the case. The story appears to have been modeled on the Book of Job, for the suffering professor is "consoled" by a series of three rabbis, corresponding to three comforters in Job, who are revealed to be absurd and ridiculous. Actually, the professor never gets an interview with the third rabbi, whose reputation for wisdom is other worldly, but his stoned son does immediately after achieving a sham success at his bar mitzvah. The two talk briefly about the names of the Jefferson Airplane band members before the boy retrieves his transistor radio that holds, in its case, the $20-bill he owes the Hebrew school drug dealer. The "voice from the whirlwind" with which the movie ends is that of the professor's doctor telephoning to request that he come to the office to discuss the x-ray results. Can they talk about it on the phone? No, they will be "more comfortable" in person, at the office. Roll credits.
Here is an interesting page showing the Twin Cities locales where scenes from A Serious Man were shot. I've gone swimming at Lake Nokomis Beach many times, but, reading the Wikipedia article on the movie, and clicking over to the articles on some of the actors, I see to my delight that I have an arguably more personal connection to the film. The wife of the physics professor is played by Sari Lennick, who "currently resides in Los Angeles and is married to financial services executive Alan T Lennick." I know Al! I used to play pick-up basketball with him, his dad, and several of his dad's work connections at some other sites around town--the health club at Highway 100 and Cedar Lake Road, Linden Hills Park in south Minneapolis, another park in Edina at the Crosstown and Tracy Avenue, and Benilde-St Margaret's High School. I knew Al had gone off to USC--he went to a private high school, Breck, and I remember his dad joking that he could hardly wait for him to be in college instead--but didn't know he'd married a star in a Coen brothers' movie!
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