She Likes to Watch

“When the truth is found to be lies
And all the joy within you dies

Don’t you want somebody to love?
Don’t you need somebody to love?
Wouldn’t you love somebody to love?
You better find somebody to love.”

– “Somebody to Love,” Jefferson Airplane

A college professor endures the trials of Job in the Coen brothers’ latest comedy

In the Biblical Book of Job, an ordinary man endures the suffering of the damned.

Raiders carry off his vast herds and slaughter his servants. Heavenly fire destroys his household. A whirlwind takes the lives of his 11 children.

Job, distraught and destitute, finds himself afflicted with painful sores.

Through it all, Job — meek, obedient, blameless Job — never complains or curses his Maker. He simply asks, “Why?”

Job might have recognized something of himself in Lawrence Gopnik, the much-wronged protagonist of “A Serious Man.”

Set in the heart of Midwestern suburbia in the turbulent 1960s, the Coen brothers’ latest comedy puts its hapless hero (Broadway standout Michael Stuhlbarg) through hell.

At first glance, Larry’s life looks perfect.

He’s got a good job as a college physics professor, a wife and two teenage kids, and a cute little ranch home in the Minnesota suburbs. He’s a respected member of his local synagogue and a faculty member in solid standing at his university.

But there’s trouble brewing under the surface.

It starts when a South Korean student tries to bribe his way to a better grade with an envelope stuffed with hundred dollar bills.

Soon, Larry is fielding angry calls from the Columbia Record Company and annoying ones from his cash-snitching, pot-smoking kids. In quick succession, he discovers that his bid for tenure is shaky, his brutish neighbor is overstepping his property boundaries and his shrewish wife Judith (Sari Lennick) is shacking with close friend Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed).

“Sy? Sy Ableman?” Larry asks, astounded.

Yup. That Sy Ableman — devout, recently widowed and ostentatiously wealthy. With his rich, resonating voice and poor grasp of the concept “personal space,” Sy is, Judith insists, “a serious man.”

Sy’s arrival spells “sayonara” for Larry and his brother Arthur, (Richard Kind), a lazy, gambling-addicted lout who’s taken up permanent residence on the couch. They’re forced to move to the Jolly Roger motel, where Larry spends his tormented nights listening to Arthur snore and drain his disgusting cyst.

Can things get any worse? Trust me. You don’t want to know.

From its darkly comic beginning to the bleak sense of foreboding that graces its closing moments, “A Serious Man” is a painful film to watch — if only for the horrific punishment that its sweet-natured sap sustains, time and time again.

Buffeted by the forces of fate and beset with temptation on every side, Larry is passive-aggressive to the point of agony. The worse things get, the more he buckles down, wondering weakly “Why me?”

“Everything that I thought was one way turns out to be another,” Larry confesses to a friend, lamenting the circumstances that are driving him to emotional, physical and financial ruin.

Like Job, he doesn’t want a redressing of wrongs — just a simple explanation for his endless suffering. The answers don’t appear to be forthcoming.

One rabbi tells him to examine the situation with fresh eyes. Another launches into a long, apparently irrelevant anecdote about a Jewish dentist who finds the Hebrew words “Help me, save me” inscribed in a gentile’s teeth. And the third? Let’s just say that the ’60s band Jefferson Airplane plays a part.

Much of the message behind in “A Serious Man” is as cryptic as the rabbi’s story.

Is there, in fact, a reason behind Larry’s suffering? Are these incidents tests of Larry’s faith or merely his sanity?

We’re never clear whether Oscar winners Ethan and Joel Coen making a statement about God’s divine plan or enjoying a mean-spirited joke at their protagonist’s expense. Or are they simply using Judaism and its grand tradition of storytelling to illustrate the cruel nature of the cosmos?

Either way, “A Serious Man” represents an evolutionary step for the Coen brothers –  away from the relatively gentle comedy of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and toward the jarring violence of “No Country For Old Men” and bitter bite of “Burn After Reading.”

Disturbing yet funny, odd yet thoroughly engrossing, it’s the kind of movie that makes a moviegoer grateful that you — unlike Larry and his all unhappy ilk — are not “A Serious Man.”

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Photo by Wilson Webb/Focus Pictures. Courtesy of MovieWeb.com.