A Serious Man (2009)

In 1970 a Minnesota Physics professor, Larry Gopnick, suffers a Job-like accumulation of afflictions that challenge his self-respect and his faith.  

But the film opens with a short yiddish drama set in a 19th Century shtetl home. The farmer exultantly tells his wife of his remarkable experience. When his wagon broke down in the blizzard a stranger appeared and helped him out. He invited the stranger home for a warm soup. When he gives the stranger’s name the wife is appalled. That man died three years ago. The visitor must be an evil spirit in disguise, a dybbuk. Sure enough, the stranger — as befits the dybbuk — declines the offer of soup. He rejects the wife’s claim that he’d died. When the wife impulsively stabs him in the stomach he doesn’t bleed. 

But then he does, a little. He asks for soup. Rather than wait, he stumbles outside. The couple fear they have killed a human being. Or have they expelled the dybbuk?

Now, the Coen brothers have stated that this amuse bouche was just an invention to set the mood. It has no more connection to the main story than the old Looney Tunes cartoons had to the features they attended. 

Not so. Remember D.H. Lawrence: “Trust the art, not the artist.” That anecdotal opening carries the heart of the film.

For one thing, its yiddish dialogue connects with the continuing theme song. “The Miller’s Tears.”  There the turning of the wheels signifies the singer’s fear of helplessly moving towards a solitary death. 

In addition, the introductory short story exemplifies the rich tradition of Jewish folklore and narrative which Gopnick’s woman friend recommends he turn to for counsel. as his marriage dissolves. The fact that she has braces on both legs prepares for the inadequacy he finds in the three rabbis he consults. The senior authority, Rabbi Marshak, with his remote authority and both natural and supernatural scholarship, even resembles the dybbuk by his forked beard and mysterious detachment. 

Most importantly, the radical ambivalence of the farmer’s initially beneficial encounter sets up the film’s presentation of life as a matter of mixed blessings. Any hint of a silver lining opens into a massive cloud. Literally, at the end. Rabbi Marshak has returned the confiscated transistor radio — with the secreted $20 — so Gopnick’s son Danny can finally pay off his debt to the bully Faigle. There a dark tornado continues its advance. The young brute’s name is a denial of the delicacy of Faigelleh, a common term for “little bird” or “gay.” The film ends on an open note of various potential doom.  

Like that farmer, Gopnick’s apparent advantages all open into vulnerability. His two children are growing distant from him and from his faith. His daughter is stealing money to save for a nose job, which Gopnick forbids. Son Danny is focused on the poor antenna reception of his F Troop and getting stoned for/at his bar mitzvah. 

Gopnick’s marriage explodes when his wife Judy reveals she is leaving him for the oleaginous Cy Ableman and expels him to a motel, sarcastically and suggestively named The Jolly Roger. A Korean student whom he has failed leaves him a fat envelop of cash to buy a passing grade. Gopnick is up for tenure but he has no publishing record and the committee has been receiving anonymous letters about him, which obviously will not influence their decision, but….

Even when Gopnick’s anger at the student causes a chain of traffic accidents that kills rival Ableman, Gopnick is not saved. His wife, amid her dramatic grieving, demands he pay for the funeral. 

Eventually life improves for Gopnick. The TV antenna challenge provides a view of the beautiful neighbour sunbathing nude. That eventually leads to their sharing a joint — and Gopnick’s fantasy of sex with her. Still, the other neighbour, a redneck hunter encroaching on Gopnick’s property line, provides a balancing fantasy of antisemitic murder.  

Then there is Gopnick’s brother Arthur, at loose ends, living on the Gopnicks’ couch then joining him in motel exile. Arthur’s continual draining of a cerbaceous cyst on his neck is a grisly emblem of the film’s major motif: life draining away. Arthur is a likeable but nightmare personification of the Miller’s song. In his despair he blames God for not having given him anything.

Indeed, even beside Gopnick’s tribulations brother Arthur is the most compelling challenge to the Rashi epigraph that opens the film: “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.” 

Gopnick struggles to find meaning in his trials. As he advises his failed student, the physics major depends on mathematics to prove the theories that physics can observe but not explain. As the dream Cy puts it, “Mathematics [not politics] is the art of the possible.” The first two rabbis demonstrate the shallowness of religious explanations of human frailty. The first, very junior, rabbi offers as solace the vision of God in the parking lot. The second remains stymied by a congregant dentist’s discovery of “Help me” etched in Hebrew inside a gentile patient’s teeth. 

Against these silly simplicities two complexities appear as if to test the Rashi. One is Arthur’s notebook, his Mentaculus, crammed pages of scribbles and scrawls that he claims enables his power to predict. That helps him win at poker games — for which he attracts police attention. But it proves of no avail when he’s busted for soliciting sodomy in North Dakota (!). To lawyer him up for the latter charge Gopnick abandons his principles, uses the student’s bribe and raises his grade to a C-. His moral stand gives way to the simplicity of his fraternal responsibility.

The second dramatic complexity is the huge blackboard Gopnick dreams of filling for  his class that ultimately proves — “The Uncertainty Principle. It proves we can't ever really know... what's going on. So it shouldn't bother you. Not being able to figure anything out. Although you will be responsible for this on the mid-term.” Indeed life is the mid-term in which we struggle to survive the inexplicable — and are best advised to steer clear from complicating things.

That’s the essential simplicity by which we stumble through faith and knowledge alike, however fervid our need for delusion. Arguably the key rabbinic illumination is Rabbi Marshak’s. Too aloof to counsel his adult congregants, he receives the bar mitzvah lads to bless them. At Danny’s visit the rabbi steps away from his usual formula with a personalized simplicity:

Rabbi Marshak: When the truth is found. To be lies.

• [the rabbi clears his throat]
• Rabbi Marshak: And all the hope. Within you dies. Then what?
• [the rabbi clears his throat again]
• Rabbi Marshak: Grace Slick. Marty Balin. Paul Kanta. Jorma...
• Danny Gopnik: Kaukonen.
• Rabbi Marshak: ...something. These are the membas of the Airplane. Interesting. Here.
• [He gives Danny back his radio]
• Rabbi Marshak: Be a good boy.   

Stepping down into the boy’s secular sphere, the Torah according to Jefferson Airplane,  the aged rabbi achieves the simplicity that is immediate, a connection, a true value. In that modest reality he one-ups even the dybbuk that his chin-growth evokes. 

p.s. Don't miss the special end-credit: "No Jews were injured in the making of this film." Good to know.

Hitchcock in The Gazebo (1959)

  Add George Marshall’s The Gazebo (1959) to the list of Best Non-Hitchcock Hitchcock films. It may not dislodge Charade but it ranks. 

Glenn Ford plays Elliott Nash, a TV writer/director who’s driven to kill a blackmailer threatening to publish old nude shots of his wife Nell (Debbie Reynolds), who’s breaking into Broadway stardom. Her devoted ex-suitor Harlow Edison (Carl Reiner) is the cop hot on his tail.

Nash is trying to write a screenplay commissioned by Hitchcock, but his blackmail worries distract him. When Hitch phones him, Nash solicits his advice and how to get rid of a body without a shovel. The “fireplace” response suggests the body might be burned away but no. Hitch rather suggested deploying the fireplace shovel. Thus the film-world produces a miniature solution to the real/reel-life dilemma. 

Hitchcock casts a more general shadow than just that scene. The whimsical imagery and music of the opening and closing title sequences evoke the tone of The Trouble With Harry (1955).  So too the characters’ assuming responsibility and guilt over a corpse they didn’t kill and the burial and unearthing of the body. Both films offer a black comic version of Hitchcock’s patented “transfer of guilt” theme. Cop Edison is a hedonistic and self-serving antithesis to sheriff Calvin Wiggs. But the antithesis is as clear a parallel as an equation would be. 

When the opening scene moves from a classic noir murder scene into the mechanics of its TV presentation we recall the theatre/life fluidity in Stage Fright (1950). (See my discussion of that film on this site.) 

A host of Hitchcocks — especially I Confess (1950), Dial M for Murder (1954), The Wrong Man (1956), etc. — lie behind the cop’s line “It’s amazing. How an innocent man can look so guilty.” Here the wrong man is the corpse as well as the erroneously accused killer.

Unlike Suspicion (1941) here the husband who appears to be so guilty actually is that guilty — until a convenient heart attack renders him innocent. 

Finally, the climactic intervention by the pigeon provides a prophetic link to the birds in Psycho (1960) — from the Phoenix setting to Norm’s stuffing and the doom of Marryin' Crane — and of course on to The Birds (1963).  

As it happens, the film’s source play, staged in London in 1958, was written by Alec Coppel, best known for his script for Vertigo (1958). He comes by his Hitchcock spirit legitimately. Indeed, Nash’s fond description of the eponymous edifice may equally apply to the British Hitchcock: “a little bit of Olde England comes to Connecticut.” 

My thanks to Joel Gunz of the HitchCon gang for alerting me to this connection. 

Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950)

  As Hitchcock admits to interviewer Francois Truffaut, “I did one thing in that picture that I never should have done; I put in a flashback that was a lie” (p. 189). If he did err, it was to assume that his 1950 audience could accept the conditional tense in a film, without an alert. Apparently they couldn’t. Reviewers claimed Hitchcock had duped them.

In fact, that very extension of cinematic narrative provides the heart of the film’s exploration of the seamless interweaving of theatre and real life. That is, we constantly shift between modes of being and modes of performing, in our daily lives. This film’s brilliance lies in how a simple whodunit so richly explores that theme.

Indeed the life-theatre confusion provides the narrative frame. The film opens on a theatre’s “Safety Curtain.” But when it rises it reveals not a theatre stage but a bustling London street scene. That’s a fluid movement between theatre, film and the “real” life that all art pretends to portray. That curtain closes the narrative when it falls down, slicing the justly suspected Jonathan (Richard Todd) in half. So much for the “safety” of that curtain. 

To keep that curtain in our mind, the Safety Glass label on Jonathon’s car is impervious to the policeman’s battering but takes a bullet hole.  Similarly, the ornamental figures on the Safety Curtain reappear in Charlotte’s (Marlene Dietrich) apartment, both on the wardrobe that holds her getaway dress and the doors that admit/bar the police.

In the first scene Eve (Jane Wyman) is driving Jonathan in urgent getaway. This conventional noir image is the film’s “real life” — the film level of performance presentation — but the scene’s falseness registers in the car’s blank back window and in Eve seeming to drive out at us. This “real” drive is openly staged. So is what happens here. Jonathan tells Eve — and us — that Charlotte killed her husband and has come to Jonathan for aid. In helping her he has made himself a suspect. 

In the parallel scene at the end. Eve and Jonathan are hiding in a prop carriage when she learns he has killed before. He decides to kill her in order to be acquitted on grounds of insanity. While the madman is shot in shadowed light, Eve is shown with a mask-like strip of light across her eyes, in the dark, as she arrives at a new understanding, i.e., vision.

These framing scenes are precisely reversed parallels. Jonathan produces his false tale as Eve drives them through the putative street reality in a car. The truth emerges when they cower backstage in a theatre prop room carriage. Truth derives from artifice. Indeed a rigged mike has Charlotte’s confession to Eve (playing dresser “Doris”) boom out at the cops in the empty theatre. Eve lured her there with “Let’s go somewhere where no-one can hear us.” In sum, we find our life truths through the artifices of our fiction, whether on the page, stage or celluloid. Conversely, to get through life we consistently draw on our fictionalized lives.

In the living representation of Jonathan’s lie there are additional layerings of realities. He imagines the maid telling the police of his flight — a fiction within the lie. Later, to flee the police he breaks into Eve’s rehearsal, forcing an embrace, a played hug interrupting the rehearsal of a play, which itself is an artifice depicting an imagined reality.

And so to the true romantic climax. In a taxi scene Eve and Detective Ordinary Smith (Michael Wilding) inexorably fall in love. That intense connection happens through but despite each character’s quite detached “performance.” Eve is unsubtly trying to make Smith suspect that Charlotte killed her husband, not her friend Jonathan. Smith pretends to listen. But he is more single-mindedly playing the suitor sinklng into infatuation. Here the intense emotion breaks through the characters’ respective “performances.” The detective played an earlier romantic role when he submits to Eve’s insistence he play their piano at tea. That romantic overture comes to represent him in her later reveries. The film closes on Smith lovingly walking the weakened Eve away out of the darkened theatre, presumably into their brightened life together. Not just the lovers but their roles/beings have been harmonized.

When aspiring actress Eve accepts boyfriend Jonathon’s lie/fiction she assumes a variety of roles to help him. That is, to play out his story. To engage Detective Smith she pretends trauma. She pretends to be a reporter to bribe Charlotte’s dresser to replace her. Amplifying this malleable identity, Charlotte misaddresses Eve’s “Doris Tynsdale” character,  first as Phyliss, then Elsie, then Doris, and finally Mavis. 

Ultimately Eve’s father, the Commodore (Alistair Sim), advises her to retreat with her acting from life to the safer theatricals of the stage: “The best thing you can do, my girl, is go back to the Academy; practice your soul-shaking antics in surroundings where they can't do any harm.” She will later struggle to balance her performances as herself and as Charlotte’s new dresser. When her remake as the real maid fails, Eve settles upon just wearing a simpler dress and hat. At that point, when Wyman’s Doris appears more like Wyman’s Eve, her Maker Hitchcock makes his cameo appearance — a passerby pausing to study the semi-transformed character. As usual, Hitchcock’s appearance has a pointed function. He’s arrested by the Eve/notEve.

The dialogue also abounds with the confusion between life and theatre, between being and performing. The Commodore calls Eve “a murderer’s moll.” Charlotte affirms that “The murderer returns to the scene of the crime, not the theatre.” Smith rejects the family’s “infernal amateur meddling” and Eve tries to assure him: “I wasn’t acting in the taxi.”

Marlene Dietrich’s Charlotte is less a local character than a visitation by a celestial persona. Hitchcock let her work out her own Sternbergian lighting. By admitting her full musical numbers he empasized her distinctive languor and sensuality. Yet her dialogue is the most honest and frank, refusing decorum: “Oh, darling, don't confide in me. Pour some tea will you.“ “I hope you're not going to turn into one of those explicit people who always tell you exactly how they feel when you ask them.“  “I had a dog once. He hated me. At last he bit me and I had him shot!” Her rumination over her widow’s weeds exults in elegant hypocrisy.

The star has the best lines: “You can stand just so much of detectives! After all, they are only policemen with smaller feet!” “Stop acting like a silly school girl! The only murderer here is the Orchestra Leader.” Here her role is wrong: the killer is indeed in the wings.

That division by performance also defines Eve’s parents. They are separated for their obvious incompatibility. Commodore Gill is a warm, insightful, mischievously open man. He’d “rather flattered myself that there was” something wrong with his reputation. He’s proud to be a “unique” father and a brandy smuggler. His wife (Dame Sybil Thorndyke) is chilly, ignorant, so starched that she takes his factual statement of the situation to be an absurd fiction. Which, of course, being a Hitchcock film, it is — to our reward and delight. Eve’s parents were obviously miscast in life, however perfect their present casting in the film.  

Life and art. Whatever their borders, they are permeable. Hitchcock's "mistake" was actually a brilliant layering of the traditional flashback.