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muckefuckYesterday I finally got around to watching the Coen Brothers' A serious man. I invited the Old Man to watch it with me, but he had better things to do. (Though he did stumble by during the prologue and end up watching most of that.) Who knew there'd be Yiddish! I understood some of it, but not nearly as much as I would've hoped (i.e. I couldn't've gotten the gist without subtitles). Also Allen Lewis Rickman as a beardy shtetl yid = SUPERCUTE.
It was a solid good watch. Even though "nothing happens" in terms of plot, I found myself engrossed throughout. Top-notch performance from Stuhlbarg. And it's so clearly a labour of love. I've had some harsh words in this space for the kind of mess you get when the Coens stray too far from their home turf, but this was practically filmed in their own backyards and populated with personalities they grew up with. The work of the production team is phenomenal; you won't find more fidelity to a period setting this side of Mad Men.
But what stimulated my nostalgia with the sheer overwhelming Jewiness of it all. I mean, for the love of Abraham, the action opens in a Hebrew school and culminates in a bar mitzvah! Of course, having been raised Catholic, the nostalgia is all second-hand: It recalls not my own adolescent experiences but the crash-course in Judaism I received when I came to U of C ("a Baptist school where Jewish professors teach atheist students Thomas Aquinas"--also heard with "Jewish" and "atheist" swapped). Before then, the only Jews I knew personally were our landlord and my siblings' friends from public school; by the time I graduated, I was volunteering my services as a shabbes goy.
But hitherto I'd read and I'd watched. Bizarrely I'd even participated in a seder before organised by one of the nuns at my grade school. (Cultural appropriation FTW!) And as someone raised in a tradition-weighted religion with a strong ethnic component, a dead liturgical language, parallel legal and educational systems, etc. it all felt instantly familiar to me. Certainly, I felt more kinship with my Jewish classmates than I did with those oddball Protestants. (It just weirded me out to hear one of them tell me about the succession of different sects he and his family had cycled through.)
Maybe without that thrill of the nearly-familiar, I would've been more troubled by some of the critics' complaints--like the underwritten female characters (no Bechdel pass here!) or the generally bleakness. But I felt like I was being granted privileged access to a world that I'd only glimpsed before despite living next to it all of my life.
It was a solid good watch. Even though "nothing happens" in terms of plot, I found myself engrossed throughout. Top-notch performance from Stuhlbarg. And it's so clearly a labour of love. I've had some harsh words in this space for the kind of mess you get when the Coens stray too far from their home turf, but this was practically filmed in their own backyards and populated with personalities they grew up with. The work of the production team is phenomenal; you won't find more fidelity to a period setting this side of Mad Men.
But what stimulated my nostalgia with the sheer overwhelming Jewiness of it all. I mean, for the love of Abraham, the action opens in a Hebrew school and culminates in a bar mitzvah! Of course, having been raised Catholic, the nostalgia is all second-hand: It recalls not my own adolescent experiences but the crash-course in Judaism I received when I came to U of C ("a Baptist school where Jewish professors teach atheist students Thomas Aquinas"--also heard with "Jewish" and "atheist" swapped). Before then, the only Jews I knew personally were our landlord and my siblings' friends from public school; by the time I graduated, I was volunteering my services as a shabbes goy.
But hitherto I'd read and I'd watched. Bizarrely I'd even participated in a seder before organised by one of the nuns at my grade school. (Cultural appropriation FTW!) And as someone raised in a tradition-weighted religion with a strong ethnic component, a dead liturgical language, parallel legal and educational systems, etc. it all felt instantly familiar to me. Certainly, I felt more kinship with my Jewish classmates than I did with those oddball Protestants. (It just weirded me out to hear one of them tell me about the succession of different sects he and his family had cycled through.)
Maybe without that thrill of the nearly-familiar, I would've been more troubled by some of the critics' complaints--like the underwritten female characters (no Bechdel pass here!) or the generally bleakness. But I felt like I was being granted privileged access to a world that I'd only glimpsed before despite living next to it all of my life.