Autobiographical for the People

Their movies are often zany and absurd – even in their darkest moments. But now JOEL and ETHAN COEN have made their most personal film yet, a suburban drama that draws on their own childhoods in the American midwest. Good luck getting them to talk about it though.

Tara Brady, 26 Nov 2009

A Serious Man, the remarkable 14th feature from the Brothers Coen, opens with a 10 minute pseudo fable from the Old Country. Set in a 19th-century Polish shtetl, this Yiddish prologue sees a hapless husband return home to his wife with a visiting rabbi she believes to be a dybbuk, a sort of Jewish vampire. All hell breaks loose.

It’s a non sequitur, of course. We’re soon transported to a Minneapolis grade school where it’s 1967 - a detail neatly conveyed by Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Somebody to Love’ – for a shaggy comedy that could easily double as Lebowski: The Bar Mitzvah Years.

The setting and the pronounced ethnicity immediately mark A Serious Man as the Coens’ most personal film to date. The film’s Midwestern Jewish community is the world they grew up in. Their hapless hero, Larry Gopnik, a maths lecturer, is partly inspired by Mr. Coen Sr., an economist.

Or is it? It wouldn’t be like the Coens to give anything away.

“I guess it’s reminiscent of our childhood,” admits Joel tentatively. “Both our parents were academics so Larry is based on people we knew. The community is not unlike ours. The rabbi character is loosely based on a rabbi we knew growing up.”

“He was our Yoda,” adds Ethan. “He was very wise but he said nothing at all.”

I know precisely what he means. Interviewing the Coen Brothers is always a little bit like an audience with The Wizard of Oz had the latter’s curtain been strong enough to withstand the mischievous intentions of a Cairn Terrier. Together they have perfected the art of saying nothing at all; Joel never quite stops looking grumpy, Ethan never quite stops staring into space, or on this occasion out the window. The London Times calls such encounters anti-interviews. Other members of the fifth column have been less euphemistic.

Though always polite and entertainingly gnomic, all attempts to analyse their milieu are met with bemusement. When the Village Voice’s J. Hoberman suggested that the climax of Miller’s Crossing was a Holocaust allegory – an entirely plausible notion when you think about it - the Coens simply shrugged and smiled.

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