To Dust

This wildly inventive black comedy declares its religious concerns in its three opening quotations. First two quotes share the screen: (i) the Kohelet assurance that upon death our body returns to its origin in dust and our spirit to God who gave it; (ii) Jethro Tull’s “God is an overwhelming responsibility.” The third — in response — is the framing Tom Waits ballad “Blow Wind Blow.”  Even apart from its valedictory lyrics, his rasping, indeed gravelly, voice is an emblem of the coarsened life due our rocky, dust-based corporeality. The wind he invokes is the ruach, the breath or spirit.

In short, the film is a Talmudic examination of the complex tension between body and soul, but in the contemporary vernacular: a Jethro Tull-mudic meditation. For the “overwhelming responsibility” of God necessarily falls upon man. “Shmuel” (or Samuel) means “he who hears God.”

Upstate New York Hassidic cantor Shmuel has trouble dealing with his wife Rivkah’s death from cancer. He can’t even make the ritual incision into his jacket lapel. 

Mainly he has nightmares about his wife’s decaying corpse. He sees her big toe explode. He is tormented by the suffering she must be feeling.  

Thirty days later, he can’t end his mourning period. So he launches a pseudo-scientific investigation into the process of a body’s decay. That is, he has lost the visceral belief that her true spiritual nature has escaped her body. 

In a comic replay of the theme, his two young sons believe their distracted father has been possessed by a dybbuk (who entered through his big toe). They try to exorcise the demon. 

On both levels the characters are concerned with the interconnection of the physical and the spiritual. Paradoxically, the boys appear to have the greater faith. For Shmuel’s obsessive empathy with Rivkah’s corpse suggests he can’t believe she’s already escaped her earthly body. His doubt disables his cantorial voice.

Through that lapse in faith, Shmuel’s quest leads him into a world of increasing secularity. It starts when the coffin seller, concluding that no possible sale is at risk, drops his reverent mien and starts conversationally to swear. From then on the dialogue hilariously pits the pious against the profane. That is, the world of the spirit dramatically collides with the dirt.

Shmuel’s orthodoxy is challenged again when he has to talk to the young woman at the community college, a dilemma he “solves” by writing her notes instead. 

Even this challenge pales before what follows when Shmuel suborns the reluctant college Biology teacher Albert to determine Rivkah’s current physical condition. Albert is teaching the need for an efficient eco-system. He trashes stuff in frustration with his class and his own mistakes. Shmuel’s intrusion grows from an irritation into his own obsession. 

Unlike Albert’s students, Shmuel acts on the teacher’s words, leading him into a sequence of profane actions, including the burial of one pig, the killing of another, the digging up of several dead, all debasing to the orthodox Jew, and all accompanied by the teacher’s verbal profanity. 

Shmuel’s degrading quest fails until the two men come upon a “body farm” where the recently deceased are held for study. Even here, they are initially frustrated by the system’s order, until they enter at night. Then Shmuel steals a glimpse of a body comparable to Rivkah’s. There he finds an assuring beauty. The system works.

The security guard who catches them finally unites the holy and the secular by their mutual inclusion. From her own family losses to cancer, she understands Shmuel’s needs so lets the men leave unarrested, uncharged. But most telling is her language: she is at once among the film’s most profane speakers and yet the most religious. She sends the Hassidic widower off with Jesus’s blessing.                               So what does God tell us through this Shmuel’s ordeal, quest and conclusion? Who knows?
     Perhaps that rituals help us deal with our most painful losses but may not in themselves be enough. A personal reconciliation may lie beyond the traditional forms and values. Perhaps our amphibian nature may require our engagement of the profane as well as the holy. The Lord may indeed move in miraculous ways His wonder to deform.