I parked my car in the field at C’s place over the summer. When I started it up it made some crazy belt noise that eventually worked itself out. The AC freon seems to have leaked out, which takes me back to being AC-less. But it runs great thankfully. That’s the good news. The bad news is that a couple of days after driving it around again, the smell of death began to steam in the cab of my car. From what I can tell, some field creature or creatures made their home in some cranny of the chassis and promptly died when the car returned to its original purposes. I dismantled the dash. I searched the engine. I crawled under the car. I took apart the trunk. Nothing. Just the foul sour stench of death and a lot of driving with the windows down.
My Academy Award Winner
Working at a movie theater has its perks. I saw A Serious Man twice in its run here and I’ve caught various scenes several times peeking my head in for a break from down time. It’s magnificent, hilarious, unsettling, beautiful, and superbly crafted throughout. I would highly recommend it, although it seems to have a polarizing effect on people, a love-it-or-hate-it impression. Clearly, I’m of the former.
There are a great many details that put this movie ahead of the rest. For example, I love how almost all of the shots of Fagel are from behind him at a slight angle to his body so he’s always looking over his shoulder at the camera. And the way the film is informed by live theater creates a best-of-both-worlds production that explores the possibilities of each to the fullest potential. Michael Stuhlbarg’s face conveys so many great thoughts and emotions simultaneously as to really capture the duality theme throughout the movie with the uncomfortable mixture of tragedy and comedy. And that enigmatic fable introduction with its laughing Groshkover sets the perfect tone. If it hadn’t been several months since I’ve seen it, I’d probably bore you with more.
Looking for the image I’ve included in this post, I recently read a critique of the movie based on its failure to stand up against its supposed inspiration, the Book of Job. I tried to reply in a comment on the page, but it would not function properly for me as a “guest”. What I hoped to say is that any claim this film is merely a retelling of Job is a very lazy summary. Job provides a groundwork for the plot and suggests an organizational method that builds the drama around the Rabbi sections. But beyond that, there are a number of inspirations and ideas at work here. There’s the American experience during the Sixties, the advent of suburban culture, the actual song “Somebody To Love”, the implications of quantum physics, the role of parable, and, of course, Jewish experience in general, among others. Plus, there are a number of other Old Testament allusions here (Bathsheba, David and Goliath, etc.), not just to the book of Job. Of all the things to come away with from this film, a rehash of obvious news blurbs is definitely not helpful. So to anyone having the same reservations about the film, look at it as a conflation of inspirations and ideas, not a reduction. There is nothing puny about this one.