Waiting for Hashem: A Serious Man

It’s an unlikely turning point, this scene in The Man Who Wasn’t There, one of the richest, most underappreciated of the Coen Brothers’ films. Tony Shalhoub’s Freddy Riedenschneider, a lawyer in love with mystifying elocution, dazzling ideas, and the art of distraction—in other words, theatre—presents his client, on trail for murder, with a philosophical argument he believes will form the lynchpin in their case: a thing changes when you look at it. Sunlight beams down upon his upturned face as he savours his discovery of paradox. His presentation finished, he then abruptly leaves the room.

I’ve been trying to figure out why I keep thinking of The Man Who Wasn’t There as the natural companion to A Serious Man, the Coens’ new film, opening today in Toronto, about one Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg, wonderful), a Jewish physics teacher and family man swept up in spiritual crisis 1967 Minneapolis. Sure, both feature a largely passive protagonist caught up in a torrent of troubles. “But I didn’t do anything!” is Larry’s recurring plea. Both are period pieces about middleclass people with unsatisfying marriages living in the suburbs. But more integrally these are the films that come closest to expressing the Coens’ particular take on the human condition, life as something perpetually mysterious and maddeningly unmoored, where chaos is never vanquished but merely ebbs and flows, where parallels and ostensible signs can’t be dependably mined for meaning. “Please, accept the mystery!” a character asks Larry. Dreams deceive dreamers because they seem so real in the moment. Voices echo from one scene into another like yelps into the void. There’s a moment, less flamboyant than Riedenschneider’s but still pretty fun, where Larry tries to explain Schrödinger’s cat to an auditorium full of students, behind him a blackboard of comically titanic proportions covered in a labyrinthine mural of equation almost no one could possibly understand. You can never be certain if the cat’s alive or dead, Larry tells his class, but you still have to explain it on the midterm.

A Serious Man is also like The Man Who Wasn’t There in that, no matter what the rigorously irreverent Coens themselves might say—some general advice: never trust the artist to interpret the work—it reveals the filmmakers at their most discreetly compassionate. The escalating woes of Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) may be rife with black comedy and caricature, but his struggle feels genuine. He’s condescended to by several supporting characters, not by the authors. Maybe—and this is a strict maybe—this is because it’s their most autobiographical work. The setting is their hometown; Larry’s occupation is the same as that of the Coens’ father; Larry’s son Danny (Aaron Wolff, deadpan and very funny), about to bar mitzvah, is roughly the same age the Coens would have been at the time, and we can only presume his pot-addled, utterly detached participation in the rituals of his Jewish community mirrors the Coens’. Maybe it also reflects something of Ethan Coen’s undergraduate studies in philosophy—his thesis was on Wittgenstein—but no matter how circular, inconclusive or just plain baffling Larry’s soliciting of advice from a series of rabbis might be, we’re not made to feel that he’s ridiculous or pitiful for having searched, any more than it might be ridiculous or pitiful for him to seek comfort in the desperate housewife next door (Amy Landecker, blearily sexy), who he first spies sunbathing from his roof one sunny afternoon. He fiddles with the antenna as Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Coming Back To Me’ seems to suddenly drift across the airwaves, lending tenderness to this scene of accidental voyeurism.

Characteristic Coen humour, often verging on non sequitur, abounds. There are jokes about incessant cyst draining or the inexplicable unseemliness of a bar called the North Dakota. There are instances of culture clash that toy with stereotype, such as Larry’s struggle to reason with a Korean student who presumes bribery to be acceptable practice in American schools. The cast, superb and devoid of name talent, speaks to the Coens’ impeccable eye for faces, not to mention ankles, necks, and the hairiest ears I’ve ever seen. Larry’s wife (Sari Lennick), wound so tight she looks like her head’s about to explode any second, seems to be leaving him for Allen Ginsberg (Fred Melamed, reassuring, and creepy). Bodies wordlessly convey repression, especially that of Uncle Arthur (Richard Kind, endearingly childish), whose posture renders him a peeled hard-boiled egg with flippers. So the Coen carnival show is in full effect, but it strikes me as a carnival of the community centre, oddly affectionate, deeply recognizable—to Jews and goys alike—and brimming with sly observations on how familiarity can suddenly become terrifying and strange when the balance of life alarmingly slips over. Larry’s troubles don’t really abate. Indeed, the film ends with fresh threats looming on the horizon. This cliffhanger is a legitimate finale however. There is resolution, even if it urges us to accept uncertainty as life’s sole certainty.

One last thought. It concerns coincidence, a big theme in A Serious Man. There was one other excellent American film released this year that also dealt with a major crisis in the life of a man living in a Jewish community. It was called Two Lovers, it starred Joaquin Phoenix, and is it just me or, from certain angles at least, and especially when smiling, do Phoenix and Stuhlbarg not look very alike? Is Hashem trying to tell us something? Talk amongst yourselves.

Counter Intelligence: Burn After Reading probes deep into dumbness

Book-ended with zooms in and out of Washington from outer space and scenes in windowless rooms and hallways somewhere deep within CIA headquarters full of essentially hapless, incoherent, bumbling government employees casually making life and death decisions, Burn After Reading isn’t exactly what you might call satire. The ostentatious placement of the nest of American intelligence in what’s made to feel here like the centre of the universe might give us reason to panic if writer/directors Joel and Ethan Coen were very interested in learning something about how the CIA works, or even had anything to say about it, however broadly critical. But this isn’t that sort of movie, which may be all for the best. What we get instead is the Coens at their most disposable and slaphappy, a characteristic jumble of wacky characters, reversals, and milieus as you’d likely find in any feature film.

Like so much of what we encounter in Burn After Reading, Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) feels like a creature of urban myth, the embodiment of a tabloid headline: LONELY SUBURBAN TRAINER SELL GOV’T SECRETS TO FUND NEW BODY, FACE. The lynchpin of this gleefully labyrinthine narrative, Linda’s failed attempts to cover her multi-tiered cosmetic surgery by credit card overdraft alone promises to be redeemed when her co-worker Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) takes it upon himself to blackmail a recently fired CIA Balkans expert named Ozzie Cox (John Malkovich) after a disc containing what’s either Cox’s memoirs or financial data or both is accidentally left behind in Hardboides, the gym where Linda and Chad work and work out, a locale doubtlessly named in honour of the 1984 “sexy comedy.”

There’s actually some sexy comedy, or at least sex-related comedy, to be found in Burn After Reading as well, what with the twitchy, ever-smiling US Marshall and semi-discreet pussyhound Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney) banging both Cox’s humourless doctor wife (Tilda Swinton) and, eventually, Linda. Though he’s shooting his load left and right, he proudly declares more than once in the film that he’s never had to fire his weapon even once in over 20 years of service, an ominous detail made more ominous by other little details fussed over by the Coens, like the painting of a rifle hanging from the bathroom wall beside Harry as he fusses over his beard in the mirror. We are, naturally, just waiting for that gun to go off, and when it does things quickly turn—as they often do in Coen Brothers movie—from silly and perplexing to morbid and perverse.

You could say that Clooney’s gotten a bit of a raw deal with the Coens, starring in O Brother Where Art Thou?, Intolerable Cruelty and now this, not a one of them being amongst the finest films in the brothers’ prolific body of work. But Clooney’s uncanny knack for stylized comedy isn’t often utilized elsewhere, and hey, at least Burn After Reading is better than The Ladykillers. And as shallow as Harry is, at least he gives Clooney some diverting business to attend to—not a claim you could make about Ozzie, who only lets Malkovich, looking eerily rubbery and gray, blow a major gasket in scene after scene, or Chad, a character that’s largely about synthetic mock-necks, frosted tips and forwarding the plot in any way possible and probably not very well cast, though Pitt for all his limitations looks like he’s having some fun, especially when rocking the treadmill. McDormand, for her part, seems to always come closest to striking the best balance between emotional realism and utter mania.

But perhaps the bigger concern here is whether or not the Coens were even sure they were making a comedy. You could argue that several of the Coens’ movies are genre hybrids—though not as many as you’d think—but the problem isn’t whether or not we can identify the genre but whether or not we feel as though we should bother investing any feelings in the characters. For all the hi-jinx, the air of paranoia and intrigue peppered throughout the film—and soaking Carter Burwell’s deliberately boilerplate score—compels us to try and generate some deeper interest in Linda, Chad, Ozzie and Harry, or at least their high-stake plights, as does the numerous subplots of romance and longing, such as that between Linda and her lovestruck boss (Richard Jenkins). But whatever emotions are built up in the film’s first two-thirds make the abrupt, goof-off ending feel that much more like a slap in face for even caring. My advice would be not to bother caring, but still see the movie. It’s pretty slight, adds up to very little, but nonetheless features enough inspired non-sequiters to entertain.

Deadpan ache: Lights in the Dusk

The Helsinki of Aki Kaurismäki’s Lights in the Dusk (Laitakaupungin valot) is a permanently overcast city possessing what should rightfully be deemed one very, very particular power of seduction, one that probably speaks directly to the hearts of some of us while making little impression on others. Seemingly dusted with melancholy, the cityscape is an apparition of earth tones and dim reflections in anonymous glass towers, expansive alleyways, skeletal industrial structures looming over shipyards.

Caught in the generally crepuscular Nordic glow, the setting, like the story, could be from today or 60 years ago. People gather to drink and hover, some arguing the diverse merits of Russian literary giants, some standing in clumps to throb before an almost comically earnest hard rock act. Whatever their numbers, alliances or activities, these Fins are all of them captured within compositions that strongly summon up Edward Hopper paintings nursing a Technicolor hangover, imparting an unmistakable loneliness only heightened by the quiet beauty of their surroundings.

Kaurismäki’s camera however will quickly focus its attention on the solitary figures: a homeless kid, a neglected pooch, and an anachronistically handsome, painfully awkward security guard named Koistinen (Janne Hyytiäinen), the sympathetic schmuck of the center of this exquisitely gloomy neo-noir. Lights in the Dusk is the third installment in Kaurismäki’s ‘Loser Trilogy,’ following 2002’s The Man Without a Past. While the film as a whole arguably adds little novelty to the writer/director’s exploration of the theme, Koistinen is doubtlessly the biggest loser of the lot. And though conveyed entirely in Kaurismäki’s characteristically –some might say perversely– rigorous deadpan, Koistinen’s tale is also quite possibly the most moving of them all, too. Okay, so long as one can be moved by something like a simple gesture, an implication, or the placement of a quartet of fresh bagels before the object of one’s deepest affections.

The plot of Lights in the Dusk is made of pared-down essence, tropes selected and renovated with great affection but precious little gratuitous indulgence. Koistinen is an outsider even among his scant workmates. He boasts to the kind woman who tends the all-night food stand that he’ll be heading his own security operation some day soon, his business aspirations simultaneously humble and hapless, a spiritual cousin to the barber who seeks a new career in dry cleaning in The Man Who Wasn’t There. Truth is Koistinen has few prospects of any kind, and lives in almost total isolation –that is until he’s approached out of the blue one day by Mirja (Maria Järvenhelmi), a mysterious woman with the most beguiling lips and obscure agenda. His hungry heart is hers from first blush, which means his fate is sealed from here onward.

Mirja is a Mata Hari Hitchcock blonde, a fame fatale working for some antiseptic mobster type who knows a real sucker when he sees one. When she first appears, the normally still camera pushes in on her the same way it does the mobster, an elegant move that binds the two in our memories and exemplifies the austerity of Kaurismäki’s approach, which crafts a distinctive style from economy itself. (The whole thing’s over in 74 minutes.) No shot is too long, no pan uncalled for, no facial muscle moved that isn’t fundamentally necessary here, though so much of it is nonetheless eccentric –a guy sharpens a steak knife with the base of a mug– often dryly funny, and shot through with repressed emotion and plenty of terrific zingers. If you know this guy’s movies you know exactly what I mean: Kaurismäki’s is the comic Bresson.

Mirja’s discomfort with shamelessly using Koistinen as a way of helping the mobsters steal some jewels from one of the properties under his watch is palpable, in an inferred sort of way. Early on in their non-love affair it’s already clear to both that everything’s a ruse –Mirja gets to a point she doesn’t even make the slightest effort to fool him anymore– but Koistinen can’t help but do anything other than obey Mirja’s will, even when it spells out complete ruin. It’s all so strange, even frustrating, on the surface but perfectly heartbreaking underneath. This stuff works on me, even more with repeated viewings.

The title evokes twilit haziness, a moment when signs of life or signs of hope blur into the day’s fading embers. The film’s complimentary story and tone meanwhile do provide us with some consolation, acts of solidarity, will, and enduring love that linger in the margins of its milieu, waiting for our hero to see past the haze and embrace what’s really present and attainable. So even though Kaurismäki lets his loser take a licking, and flashes it all past our eyes with merciless efficiency, there’s a warmth waiting at the end of all this, a candle in the window that should charm and reward each of us predisposed to such subtle delights.

Breath, footsteps, terrain: Josh Brolin on No Country For Old Men

The dual nature that haunts No Country For Old Men is elegantly conveyed in its opening moments. As we look upon a desolate, depopulated Texan desert, we hear the voice of Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) consider the emergence of a new plateau of evil and danger in the world: an old man speaking of change over a vision of a place that seems to have remained essentially unchanged for far longer than any of us can imagine.

The Coen Brothers have fiddled with authors from Homer to Dashiell Hammett, but No Country is their first genuine literary adaptation. Cormac McCarthy’s exquisite novel about $2 million in cash, a resourceful Vietnam vet, a weary small-town sheriff and a terrifyingly efficient killer (played with unforgettable precision by Javier Bardem) possessed by a cold understanding of the randomness of human existence, was already so vivid and immediate that any smart filmmaker would know enough to basically just shoot it as it reads, which is precisely what the Coens have done.

There’s a certain purity to McCarthy’s novel. It spends little time with character background or interior voice. In this world action equals character. The Coens honour McCarthy’s terms and have crafted a masterful work of suspense, evocatively spare, full of easy charm, ultimately chilling. A grunt, the creak of floorboards, a relentless dog or a man’s reflection in a television set invoke the film’s themes far more compellingly than any grand gesture could.

Josh Brolin plays Llewelyn, one of the film’s triangle of lead characters. When I sat down with Brolin on behalf of Vue Weekly last September he was hung-over but bright-eyed, cheerful and fuzzy looking in his V-neck sweater. He knows No Country’s something special, that he’s very good in it and that both will be recognized accordingly, and thus carries with him the air of humble satisfaction that comes to a guy who’s deserved this break for a long time.

Vue Weekly: Was No Country For Old Men something you’d heard about and actively pursued or something you were sent?

Josh Brolin: I heard about the book first. Sam Shepard told me about it. We were in Texas. I was doing Grindhouse and he was promoting Don’t Come Knocking. I had done True West for him in New York.

VW: Which part?

JB: Both. We traded roles every four performances, Elias Koteas and me. Anyway, Sam told me I had to read this book so I went out and bought it. I heard about the movie long afterward. I ended up doing an audition tape with Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. I asked Robert if he’d make a video of me and he said, “Let’s just use our equipment,” so we used a $950 000 Genesis camera. Quentin directed me, Robert shot it, and we sent it to the Coens. Their first response was, “Who lit it?” It was that good-looking. But I didn’t get the movie from that. No, they weren’t interested in me. It wasn’t until their last meetings with actors that they finally phoned my agent and said, “Fine, you’ve bugged us for too fucking long”. And then I met them and that was it. I got the part.

VW: Were you surprised how cleanly the film just lifted the novel off the page?

JB: Yeah, with one significant exception, it’s a very loyal adaptation of a book you don’t want to mess with. With adaptations you either take an idea and make it into something else or you have something like No Country that reads so cinematically a movie can only enhance it. Because its about breath, its about footsteps, its about wind, its about the terrain.

VW: Do you read a lot of American fiction?

JB: Do I read a lot? Yes. Do I read a lot of American fiction? Not necessarily. But McCarthy’s been on my mind a lot for a while now. I became a big fan. He’s like the Dylan Thomas of West Texas, so incredibly poetic.

VW: Yet because his prose is so spare, the film itself realized so starkly, was it difficult to find a way in as an actor?

JB: It was wonderful, actually. We talked about it a long time. We felt these characters conscientiously. What was wonderful was just being able to experiment with less is more. Being able to create an atmosphere where “Mn” actually means something. There were single words we’d rehearse because one word might be the only thing he’s saying within a 10 minute stretch of film.

VW: So throughout the process you were able to consult frequently with the Coens?

JB: Yeah, about Llewelyn’s laconic nature, how we want him to communicate, how far we wanted to go with him talking to himself, where it’s like he’s got a little friend helping him out, as opposed to someone losing their mind. There was some ad-libbing. There was stuff we took out. There was one point where I went up to Joel and Ethan and told them that I didn’t think we should have Llewelyn say anything here, that the wind would be better.

VW: The wind played a pretty big role in this movie.

JB: (Performs a whistling desert wind)

VW: The atmosphere, how strongly it informs the audience’s involvement in the material—were you able to glean what that atmosphere would be like when you were making choices as an actor?

JB: The atmosphere spoke for itself. Or rather it was spoken for. Let’s put it that way. All you have to do is go out to Texas and you’re in it. I think what you’re responding to is more how they lit it, what lenses they used, how they’d let a little guy in a big landscape walk from one end of the screen to the other. That was the tone they were trying to create. But when you get out there, to West Texas, the character of the setting is so specific, so developed for you already, there’s not a lot of manipulation that goes on. You just have to show up.

VW: I think your work in this film is so distinctive. I wonder if perhaps you look at it as a sort of turning point for you as an actor.

JB: No. I think I’m the same actor I always was. It’s just that people are seeing the movies now. That’s the difference. The difference is working with people who are really accomplished, iconoclastic filmmakers. That’s the difference. I love working with people who are about the work. I’ve worked with people who aren’t about the work. “Is this gonna make me more famous? Is this gonna make me more money?” Which is fine, if that’s what you’re in it for. I think money’s great. I’m a businessman. I love money. But it’s not very satisfying in the end when you look back and realize that you could’ve done a better job had you been more focused on the humanity of the piece, or something like that.

VW: Could you put your finger on the kind of film you want to be involved in from here onwards?

JB: The parts that I respond to are the ones where you pigeonhole the character at the beginning of the movie and then it breaks again and again. Llewelyn you figure for a dim-bulb at the beginning, and as it turns out he’s not. I did a movie called Flirting with Disaster where I played the FBI agent. You see him with the glasses and the hair back, and then it turns out he’s got tattoos, he’s bisexual, he’s a fetishist. I like those characters. Those are fun characters. I like those kinds of characters because I like those kinds of people. People who aren’t what they seem.