Autobiographical for the People

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.
It is, therefore, something of a small victory when you get something right. When I note the possible influence of Yiddish author Isaac Bashevis Singer, the brothers exchange glances and nod. Score one to me.
“Yeah,” says Ethan. “That was an influence.”
Oops. He’s given too much away, he backtracks ever so slightly; “Well, in that we were reading Isaac Singer and thinking about him when we wrote the screenplay, particularly the story at the beginning. I don’t even know why. I guess we wanted that whole homey Yiddish thing of being married to the supernatural.”
“I don’t even know what we wanted that story to introduce the main film,” continues Joel. “I guess it was just in terms of feeling, to introduce a note of unease and also to emerge you unambiguously in a world of Jews.”
Like Singer’s literature, or indeed, the Old Testament, the Coeniverse is populated by luckless schmeils and schlubs. Their heroes rarely prosper; at best, they come out like Gabriel Byrne in Miller’s Crossing, on top but isolated and alone in the damp woods. More often, they are screwed from the get-go; Tom Hanks in The Ladykillers, George Clooney in Burn After Reading, Billy Bob Thornton in The Man Who Wasn’t There; all of these guys have wriggled and squirmed on the Coen canvas to no avail.
“You can read A Serious Man as a sort of schmeil story,” says Joel.” But you can also read it as an alternate Jewish folk tale. Some people have suggested that it’s a Job story and Larry certainly does have troubles heaped on him without end. But there is a distinction in this movie as it’s not his faith that’s being tested exactly. None of those ways of reading the story bother us. They may not be what we intended, or at least consciously intended, but they fit with what we were generally
going after.”
Like Bob Dylan, we feel we know the Coen brothers without really knowing anything. Born two years apart in a Minneapolis suburb, they started making comedies on a Super-8 camera when they were still kids. Joel studied film at NYU, Ethan read philosophy at Princeton but both went straight into movies as editors on Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead. They surround themselves with Coen regulars; players such as George Clooney, John Tuturro, John Goodman, and a technical crew that rarely changes. They are, says Ethan, like family, sometimes literally as well as figuratively. Joel is married to Coens regular, Frances McDormand, while Ethan is married to their sometime editor, Tricia Cooke.
“We don’t need to change what we do from film to film,” says Joel. “It’s true that there’s always a mix of new and old people on each movie. But the process doesn’t alter because the technical people are usually the same so each set feels familiar. We’re working with a lot of the same people for 25 years. They’re there every day that we’re shooting and they’ll be there every day shooting on the next one we make. They’re the more constant element, far more than the actors.”
“Yeah,” adds Ethan. “Like on this movie there’s no real continuity of actors. It was a weird situation. The community that we were writing for is so particular, so specific that we were compelled to cast from that community from an ethnic point of view. There’s not a lot of Jewish characters in Hollywood movies. Well there are, but usually they end up being played by people like Cameron Diaz. So we really wanted to stay away from that.”
A Serious Man plays out against a turbulent sixties backdrop, a time of ‘new freedoms’ as the film’s resident succubus puts it. This is a common Coen device; O Brother, Where art Though? takes in the Depression Era, The Big Lebowski frequently nods at the first Gulf War. I wonder why the brothers recreate historical periods with such a meticulous eye for detail, only to ignore broader issues in favour of fiendish plots.
“Everything serves the story,” shrugs Ethan. “With this movie the setting is the way it is because that’s our childhood. It’s a personal thing rather than anything that’s happening in the world at large. And when you’re 10 or 12 or 13 what’s happening in the world at large isn’t a big deal anyway. Who cares if the world is in turmoil or it’s the 60s? Anything that’s part of the world that isn’t part of your everyday reality doesn’t exist. Nothing is bigger than your domestic life.”
Given that personal relationship with the setting and details, weren’t they tempted to ease up on poor old Larry Gopnik, the unfortunate at the centre of A Serious Man?
“No way”, says Joel. “That’s the fun part. Coming up with the stories. But it’s a funny thing.”
‘When you’re creating a character you don’t ever view them as you would a real person or even a fictional person. You have a much stranger relationship with your created characters than you do as a reader or an audience member. You don’t have that kind of sympathy when you’re the people making them up.”
“Yeah,” says Ethan. “And besides, our characters have a purpose or function in the story. We’re not there to serve them.”
Prolific as ever, the brothers are set to start shooting a remake of True Grit featuring Jeff Bridges in a role made famous by John Wayne. Sadly, they are now quite sure that To the White Sea, their much gabbed about adaptation of the WW2 travelogue by James Dickey will not come to pass.
“It’s gone,” says Ethan with a shake of the head. “It’ll never happen.”
Is it still exciting for them, I wonder? Is it still like making Super-8 movies on the lawn?
“It’s work in the sense that it’s a familiar task,” says Joel. “And like any familiar task it can sometimes be like a chore, sometimes be like a lot of fun. You know? Essentially, for decades now, we’re just remaking The Wizard of Oz. The Wizard of Oz informs everything that pretty much everybody does. That includes us.”
And this Toto waves goodbye knowing that she didn’t really get anything like a peek at the professor, but she at least had a tug at
that curtain.