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.
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