A SERIOUS MAN directed and written by Joel and Ethan Coen, with Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick and Fyvush Finkel. An Alliance release. 105 minutes. Opens Friday (October 16). For venues, times, and trailers, see Movies.
The braying American writer at the TIFF round table is trying to understand why Joel and Ethan Coen cast their new movie, A Serious Man, with unknown actors.[rssbreak]
“Why no stars,” he asks them, “when you could have anybody you wanted in a Coen brothers film?”
“Well, that’s kind of it,” Joel says, a hint of incredulity in his voice. “Who suggests themselves, from the big bankable stars, as a Midwestern Jew – at least one that’d pass our smell test?”
This is the thing about A Serious Man. It is extremely specific to its era, its characters and their mentality. It’s set almost entirely within the hermetic universe of the half-assimilated Jewish community of 1967 Minneapolis, focusing on the spiritual crisis of a college physics professor whose entire life seems to be falling apart in the weeks leading up to his son’s bar mitzvah.
It’s a world that Joel (the tall, scraggly-looking one) and Ethan (the smaller, more animated one) know very well. They used to live there.
“It’s semi-autobiographical,” Joel says, “in the sense that the context for the story takes place in a community very much like the one we grew up in, Minnesota 1967, and that also there are a couple of very superficial similarities to our family. Well, the only one is that the father is an academic, and our father was a university professor. But beyond that, he wasn’t really anything like the character in the movie, and the story is made up. It doesn’t have anything to do with anything that happened in our family.”
So while the Coens probably could have talked George Clooney into taking the part, it wouldn’t have felt right. Therefore, they didn’t ask him, and cast New York stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg instead.
This is the first time the Coens have mined their own histories for material. Fargo made glancing reference to Minnesota life, obviously, but the new film, and its eerie replication of the attitudes and affectations of a certain streak of American Jewish culture, seems to pull aside a curtain and look into the brothers’ bedrooms. Was it challenging to put so much of themselves into A Serious Man?
“I think it was maybe even a little easier,” Joel says, “because we had so much personal knowledge of the details we wanted to put in. It might have been the opposite.”
“It’s kind of fun in that respect,” Ethan says. “Jess Gonchor, the designer, is also suburban Jewish – although East Coast and a little younger than us – and I think we all enjoyed that aspect of it, the whole design thing. The set decorator is great, although she’s a shiksa.”
Everyone giggles at that but almost immediately stops. Is the shiksa line going too far? Too specific? Might this be interpreted as offensive by people looking for examples of unconscious Jewish self-hatred?
“That actually is something we’re very curious about,” Joel says, “and I think we were curious about it as soon as we started making the movie. We are curious about how a lot of it translates – I mean, outside of its obvious constituency, you know? But it’s been pretty encouraging, I have to say.”
Ethan agrees. “We’re probably both worried – not even worried, curious – about whether there’d be, like, hostility. But the religious Jews who’ve seen it so far have been surprisingly open. A lot of Jews see things through the prism of ‘Is this good for the Jews?’ or whatever, but I must say, it hasn’t….”
He trails off. Joel picks up the thought.
“We haven’t encountered any negative push-back in terms of that. In fact, it’s been just the opposite. It’s about a person wrestling with those issues – and people probably find just having those sort of issues addressed is something.”
Interview Clips
Ethan Coen on whether there’s a strategy to moving between “commercial” and “non-commercial” projects:
Ethan and Joel on the unique contrast between the characters and the landscape:
Joel and Ethan on how their process has evolved in 25 years of making movies:
normw@nowtoronto.com
