Far Too Deep For Its Own Good

We don’t go on the park this morning because despite some heavy rain dog training this afternoon is on. At which MD is hopeless, although in his defence I suppose he has had a few weeks off and also he gets into a fight, which in his defence, I would say wasn’t really his fault. I’m always sticking up for that dog.

Meanwhile L is out running and cycling. I’ve done a bit of maintenance on her bike for her, swapping her back to bog standard flat pedals and reassembled her bike computer for her, putting back the parts I had stolen to fix mine. When she gets back after an hour’s cycle she tells me she’s done a grand total of 0.38km. Ah, she likes to take it steady but not that steady. I think I may have reassembled it wrong.

Later we’re at the cinema only to find that our membership cards have expired. So we have to fork out on renewal fees. The upside is our first two films are free, so tonight’s is a freebie and what a weird one it is. Then again it is the new Coen Brothers’ film, so what did we expect.

‘A Serious Man’ is clearly a dig at the lives and faith of a Jewish community in late 1960s America but of course if you don't know a whole lot about the Jewish faith then you could be stumbling from the off.

Just to make sure you are stumbling from the off, the film opens with a possibly irrelevant, possibly not, prologue set a century or two earlier and spoken all in subtitled Yiddish. In it a woman stabs an old man because she thinks he's a dybbuk, that’s a dead person possessed by an evil spirit. She’s wrong because the old man starts to bleed before getting up and wandering off into the snow outside. Does this action perhaps lead to a curse being bestowed up on someone? There’s no way of knowing for sure.

Could this someone be Larry Gopnik, a physics professor who is the main focus of this story? Larry is hoping for a life long tenure from his University but things are slowly starting to go wrong for him. Not least of which is an anonymous letter writer trying to derail the tenure.

On top of this his family life in comfortable suburbia is rocked when his wife informs him that their marriage is over and she wants to marry someone else. This someone else is, inexplicably, Sy Ableman, supposedly a pillar stone of the local community but in reality a patronizing old git. Meanwhile his kids are proving to be even more of a handful than kids are supposed to be. His son likes to dabble in marijuana and is consequently in debt to the school bully, is running up debts on an account with a record club at his Father’s unwilling expense whilst generally being more concerned about the poor reception on the TV than his studies.



Then there’s Larry’s daughter, who is saving up for a nose job with money straight out of Larry’s wallet and spending the rest of her time washing her hair, that is when she can get in the bathroom. Larry brother is occupying the bathroom, when he’s not sleeping on the coach, bringing to the family his medical, social and gambling problems. Larry is incredibly hopeless in the face of all this adversity and his wife soon banishes both him and his brother to the Jolly Roger Motel.

At least this gets him away from his goy (non-Jew) neighbour who is encroaching on Larry’s garden with his building plans but not from the Korean student who is pushing envelopes of cash onto Larry to persuade him to upgrade the F he gave him, while simultaneously threatening to sue him for defamation...

Now let’s just stop right there shall we. If you’ve broken cinema rules and not turned your phone off, then perhaps you ought to fire up Google right now. Google ‘Schrödinger's cat’, which is something we see Larry teaching to his physics students. Do it now, rather than afterwards like I had to.

Schrödinger's rather unpleasant, and hopefully theoretical, experiment consists of a live cat, a vial of Hydrogen Cyanide and a small amount of radioactive substance all together in the same box. If even a single atom of the radioactive substance decays, a relay mechanism will break the vial with a hammer and the cat will die. The point of it all is that no one can know what is happening in the box without looking inside it. Therefore according to the laws of quantum physics, the cat must be assumed to be in a superposition of states, e.g. both dead and alive at the same time. It is only when someone opens the box that they can find out the condition of the cat.



The F grade student and his father have grasped the theory of Schrödinger's cat, if not the maths of it, which is why he got an F. Like the cat, their bribe is seemingly alive and dead at the same time until Larry decides what action he is going to take. This film is possibly far too deep for its own good.



So, Larry, along with us (the audience), is slowly going out of his mind, particularly as a mathematician he’s used to things adding up, and he goes off to consult with the local Rabbis to find out just what he’s done to upset Hashem (God).

A junior rabbi tells him 'things aren’t so bad' and cites the car park as proof of the wonders of God. Larry isn’t impressed.

A more experienced rabbi rambles on for ages about a dentist who desperately tried to find the meaning of the Hebrew words 'Help Me’ that he found engraved on the inside of a goy patient's teeth but he finds no meaning. Larry isn’t impressed. Perhaps the rabbi is telling Larry he’s better off not worrying about it, sometimes there are no reasons for things that happen in life. Perhaps the Coen brothers are telling us we’re better off not worrying about trying to find meaning in this film.

The only person in the film who threatens to come up any answers is the lawyer enlisted to solve the problems Larry is having with his neighbours encroachment but the lawyer drops down dead just as he’s about to deliver up his findings.

The most senior rabbi of all, Rabbi Marshak, won't even see Larry. He’s seemingly too busy listening to a transistor radio confiscated from Danny, Larry’s son. This, after Danny’s Bar Mitzvah to which Danny turns up stoned, is returned to him by Rabbi Marshak.

So the story rambles and roams all over the place and goes nowhere and everywhere. This isn't unusual in a Coen's film but usually the journey to nowhere is a bit more exceptional than this or perhaps you just needed to be Jewish. It has the usual dark comedy laughs but it’s certainly not hilarious. It all makes for a very strange and challenging film.

Folk in the know say the film is a retelling of the book of Job from the Hebrew Bible, in which God and Satan bet on whether Job will remain faithful as Satan makes life as uncomfortable for Job as he can. Apparently the three consultations, even the whirlwind that comes at the end, it’s all in there. Yep, this film is definitely far too deep for its own good.

So does Larry remain faithful? Well so far he has, unlike Sy Ableman who was attempting to take another man’s wife. Suddenly God seems to get even with Sy and he dies in a road accident, coincidentally the same road accident that Larry is involved in, but he escapes unhurt.

Finally Larry cracks. He gives into temptation with the Jewish woman next door who sunbathes nude and invites Larry to ‘take advantage of the new freedoms’. Then he rubs out the Korean’s F grade... and the cat is dead. Then it just ends, in Coens style, with a ‘come see me’ call from his Doctor and a whirlwind approaching his Son’s school.



This is probably one of those films that grow on you. In fact the more L and I discuss it and the more I Google it, the more I like it but basically it helps if you know a bit about quantum physics, a lot about the Hebrew bible and oh, perhaps a bit of familiarity with the music of Jefferson Airplane.

Read To Me

I'm still off work but then isn't the whole world. Another lie in but shorter. L seems to have developed 'the dreaded cough'. For a change we get the car out and take the dogs for a walk on Bestwood Park where there are lots of squirrels for MD to sneer at which means my arms come back considerably longer. There is also a new experience for him, horses.

In the afternoon, I actually manage some sport. I go for a swim whilst L hits the gym.

Then we take in a film at Broadway where both Jaipur and Rosey Nosey are on. So we sample both. After that the film better be good or else I'll be nodding off.

It is 1958 in Germany and Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) discovers a fifteen-year-old schoolboy throwing up outside her home. She charitably cleans him up and helps him back home to his family.

The boy is Michael Berg (David Kross), he turns out to have scarlet fever, and is bedridden for three months. Once he is well again, he returns to visit Hanna with a bunch of flowers to thank her. Hanna is a bit offhand about his gratitude and even starts to take a bath in his presence. Michael runs away in embarrassment.

Eventually Michael decides to return, presumably just to catch her in the bath but this time, after a bit of a mishap, it is he who needs the bath and Hanna duly supplies one. Seeing him in the bath gets her thinking. She decides she fancies a bit of that as a thank you and gets her own kit off. In this manner, Michael begins a passionate affair with a mysterious woman more than twice his age.

Hanna tells him that she likes being read to and he discovers that if he reads literature to her, Hanna will be passionately grateful in return. The 'kid', as she calls him, treats her to 'The Odyssey', 'Huckleberry Finn' and 'The Lady with the Little Dog' among others and in return she treats him... to... well plenty.



All the time, Hanna is remote and uncommunicative. He learns little about her, although he does asks her name as early as the third shag, pushy or what. Other than that, she doesn't offer anything to him, other than herself. It is clear she is using Michael, in more ways than one, but he is enjoying it immensely and finds himself hopelessly in love with her. This causes friction at home and with his schoolmates where he passes up on a girl called Sophie, who appears eager for him to read to her.



Hanna works as a glum conductor on the trams but when she is offered promotion to an office job, she disappears and Michael is heartbroken. The story moves on eight years. Michael is now studying law and his class attend a war crimes trial. Which is a pretty cool field trip to have.

He is stunned to see Hanna across the courtroom, standing as a defendant in the trial. Talk about someone popping the bubble of your first love. He learns that his former lover was an SS guard during the war and she is on trial with five other women for allowing several hundred prisoners to burn to death inside a church. The trial traumatises Michael, he has never gotten over his love for Hanna, and now he is guilt ridden for having fallen for her.

He also realises that what he knows about Hanna might influence the trial. He discusses this with his teacher but these conversations aren't elaborated on, which is a shame. In the end, Michael holds his silence and so condemns Hanna to a lifetime in jail. It also begs the question as to what Hanna's lawyer was playing at. Didn't do his research very well, did he?

The film portrays Hanna as a simple person, used to taking orders, someone just doing her job. Hanna herself seem to understand little of what she was accused of and was prepared to take the wrap for the others rather than experience a little embarrassment because of her own inadequacies.

Michael never felt able to visit Hanna in jail, but as a way of erasing some of his guilt he records himself reading the same books he read to her during their love affair and sends them to her in prison. Michael is now played by Ralph Fiennes, whose glum demeanour makes Hanna look positively cheerful. It is such a change from the lively young Michael played by David Kross. Michael now comes across as a weak man, unable to get his head around the two sides of the woman he knew.

As her release draws near, he finally visits her, now played by a cosmetically aged Winslet. However he is as distant to her as she was at first to him, if not more so and he basically condemns Hanna a second time. This time she takes her own life.

At the end of the film, Michael travels to the flat of a Jewish woman who was one of the survivors and wrote a book about it. Her book was used in evidence at the trial. It is Hanna's dying wish that her few savings went to her. Michael makes an embarrassing bodge of dealing with this. What did he hope to achieve? Somehow, he appeared to think he might be welcome.

It’s a good film, full of interesting ideas, but suffers from an uninspiring execution of these idea. There are too many questions, not enough answers. This was surely the intention but it is unsatisfying. The key element of the story became clear to me early on. It may even have been a better film had it been made obvious at the start and therefore elaborated on. I also like a bit of controversy in my films but I'm afraid, on that front, this was a letdown too.

Winslet is good but in trying to play Hanna as moody but comes across as a bit wooden and she's better than that. Perhaps, in trying to push for an Oscar she's pushed too hard. Fiennes part is more of a supporting role, at times it is unnecessary, and undoes a lot of the good work done by David Kross, who is excellent.

We retire for a debrief at the Hand and Heart, where we get accosted by one of Daughter's customers from her paper round, or it might have been the neighbour of a customer. He is very drunk but full of praise for her. We have to time our exit well because he is dancing with all the customers as they leave. It's his fault that we have to have a second Leffe.