I've seen this twice in three days. It's entertaining and intriguing in equal measure and as its bafflingly short run at my local cinema ended tonight I had to see it again. I'm not Jewish. I don't know much about the faith. It didn't really matter the way that I was worried at points that it would.
This harks back to the Coen's equally layered Barton Fink and is a refreshing improvement on the relatively weak Burn After Reading, if not near the standard of that film's predecessor No Country For Old Men. The plot is deceptively simple; set in 1967 it addresses a middle-aged man faced with tumultuous changes in his life and in the wider world, seeking the answer to the eternal question- what's it all about? Here's where the spoilers come in if you haven't seen it.
For me, the whole point of the film is that there is no hope of knowing what it's all about and, therefore, no point wondering about it. Life is to be lived and not analysed. The message is related again and again. The pre-credits story sets the mood- it is cryptic and unresolved. Was the visitor really a Dybbuk? Was the wife's belief in the supernatural misplaced or her husband's rationality? We don't know, how could we? It is a matter of faith; or of an absence of faith.
The film progresses in the same vein. The protagonist, played with a lightness that belies his earnestness, Michael Stuhlbarg faces a series of life-events that confound and damage him with great dignity and stoicism. Only once does he lose his temper at all, and that is in the privacy of his own car. He simply wants to know why he is being pushed and tested and harmed- what does God want from him? His search takes him to visit three Rabbis of increasing seniority and each, in their own way, conveys the message that there may not be a reason and if there is anyway, it will be beyond his understanding. Okay, so that isn't the most profound message any film has ever related, but it is funny and telling and probabbly true. Sy Abelman was a serious man, well he's dead; Lawrence Gopnik is- or has always tried to be- a serious man (in his own words) and where has that got him? Bobby McFerrin got the same message across in three minutes or so, but he didn't make you laugh and he didn't look as wonderful as this film does- props for Roger Deakins are, of course, compulsory in a Coens review.
The story of the goy's teeth, Schrodinger's cat, the dream where Gopnik intones "you may not understand it but you'll be responsible for it", Marshak repeating the Jeffersen Airplane lyrics, the opening scene, the quote which opens the film ("Receive everything that happens to you with simplicity"), dammit even the car park Larry. All the clues are there, if only you'll look for them. I've even forgotten a couple of lines I wanted to quote.
Maybe if I read the book of Job I wouldn't be convinced that Jefferson Airplane are the key to the whole thing. But I am.
"When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies..."
