The Coen Brothers Man Up

On bar mitzvahs, recovering from Hebrew school and their latest film, "A Serious Man."

“A Serious Man” marks Ethan and Joel Coen’s return not only to the Midwest for the first time since “Fargo,” but to an era they know well from growing up in Minnesota’s St. Louis Park during the 1960s. As a New Yorker profile of local son Senator Al Franken recently noted, the heavily Jewish suburb has given birth to a generation of such acute thinkers as the Coens and Thomas Friedman. Yet when we meet Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a harried physics professor at the local college, he is a man utterly bereft of answers.

As he faces a decision on his tenure at work, Gopnik is plagued by troubles on all fronts — his wife (Sari Lennick) wants a divorce, his children Danny and Sarah are selfish brats, and his brother’s (Richard Kind) prolonged stay on the family couch exacerbates matters. Even Gopnik’s rare escape from his problems in the form of gazing at a nude sunbathing neighbor (Amy Landecker) brings up moral dilemmas that he attempts to solve via the counsel of three rabbis, all of whom are more interested in digressive stories about Hebrew-inscribed teeth and parking lots than the problems of the downtrodden academic. But in his quest to talk to the revered Rabbi Marshak, the Coens’ bizarro “Wizard of Oz” becomes one of their most densely layered films to date, as well as one of the most bitingly funny, as Gopnik grapples with the pressures of his faith and his need for self-preservation. In Toronto, I had a lighthearted conversation with the Coens, who finish each other’s sentences, about how personal their latest film actually is and the weirdness of bar mitzvahs.

Between this film and your upcoming adaptation of Michael Chabon’s “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union,” you’ve been steeped in Judaica for the past couple years. What sparked the renewed interest?

Joel Coen: “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” was a bit of a coincidence, actually, coming on the heels of this.

Ethan Coen: It just fell into our laps. The producer Scott Rudin had bought the rights to the book and asked us to adapt it, write a screenplay. We just read the book and liked it. But we had already written this, it was before we shot this that we agreed to do the script for that.

As someone who spent some time at a Hebrew school, I know that can be an experience some would never want to revisit.

JC: We have a little perspective on it now because we’ve been away from it for so many years, so it seemed more interesting or funny or exotic or something to revisit now that…

EC: It must be one of those things there are seven stages of…

JC: Of denial…

EC: With flight…

JC: [laughs] Yes, denial, acceptance…

EC: And one of those later stages.

JC: Rage. [laughs]

EC: Nobody goes to Hebrew school and doesn’t feel rage at some point. [laughs]

Was it the right time for this film because you have the perspective for it, or because as filmmakers you have the clout to tell this particular story the way you’d want to tell it?

JC: I think all of those things are part of it. We’re a little older. The clout to make it? That one maybe not, but maybe. We might not have considered it early on just because it would’ve seemed so iffy. On the other hand…

EC: Yeah, you’ve got to be kind of established to have done this movie. It’s really true.

JC: Although “Barton Fink” was pretty weird at the time. But we had already done a number of movies at that point, too. ["A Serious Man"] would’ve been hard to do as a first or second movie, unless you were willing to go much lower budget than we were.

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