Sometime in the not too distant past, a carefully wrapped package arrived at the door of its addressee – one Mr Carter Burwell. Nestled neatly within this wrapped package lay three neatly bound sets of crisp pages. These bound sets of pages comprised the next three proposed projects on the slate of the brothers Coen. These were, in respective order; No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading, and A Serious Man. Mr Burwell is, as Coen cultists will surely tell you, their musical collaborator of some 20 years now. The note inside the package asked him to give some thought to how the scripts might be infused musically.
The fact that these three scripts arrived altogether is another example of the meticulous and fastidious approach the brothers are said to take when making films according to their regular collaborators. In Ben Walters and J. M. Tyree’s beautifully lucid and consistently astute BFI Classic Guide to the Coens’ The Big Lebowski, they mention the ‘painstaking and joyous detail’ which imbues not only The Big Lebowski and its preparation, but other Coen pictures too.
This is backed up by interviews with the aforementioned Carter Burwell elsewhere, but also their regular sound editor and collaborator of 25 years, Skip Lievsay. Both these sonic artists attest to the intricate and minutely prepared scripts which are then taken by the Coens to be as sacred as the Torah is to the prim conservative suburban Minnesotans sketched in A Serious Man. Storyboards are pored over until they are works of art in themselves, ditto dubbing instructions and budgets are kept stringently in check by the Coen whip. The intended result is a working atmosphere on-set which even the Dude would find most agreeable (any aggression will not stand, man!).
This approach is taken, without exception, to every picture they produce. However, as we know now, the middle picture of that triptych of films mentioned above – Burn After Reading – fared much less well in its critical reception than its enveloped cousins. It was dismissed as frivolous, a warm-down exercise after the mean exertions of No Country, a simple farce with no discernible depth. In ‘mere surmise’ as Larry’s failing Korean student might (hilariously) mumble in A Serious Man, Burn After Reading was not taken as ‘serious’ film making.
A Serious Man, if you read its gushing reviews, seems to have been taken as the Coens reaching out for higher, theological and therefore more meaningful, serious ground (despite its evidently wilful absurdism). Similarly, because it is apparently their ‘first’ nearly ‘autobiographical’ film, it has also been taken as their most authentic film which then seems to have conferred even more critical kudos upon it. This is, according to their critics, the Coens taking comedy seriously! As opposed to The Big Lebowski , Raising Arizona, Burn After Reading and probably Intolerable Cruelty, too, which apparently were not.
Walters and Tyree, admittedly a little confusingly, allude to this tendency in critical reaction, ‘To dismiss comedy as merely unserious, rather than seriously unserious, is to forget that it is one of the most mysterious, valuable and difficult to achieve of all artistic effects.’
By calling this film A Serious Man, it’s almost as if the Coens had read this put down and are twisting the already confusing strand into further knots.
But is A Serious Man really that detached from their other work? All the regular Coen ticks are accounted for and present (some as identified in William Preston Robertson’s insightful book on The Big Lebowski): intentionally repetitive and phonetic dialogue, dream sequences, sudden explosions of violence, wild profanity, canny haircuts, wailing fat men, visual puns (in A Serious Man Larry is a genuine Fiddler on the Roof and a victim of blue sky thinking), emasculated men, dope and absurd juxtapositions.
There are also plenty of other content overlaps with their other films – ‘The Uncertainty Principle’ which Larry sees in hallucinatory nightmare, is also to be heard discussed in The Man Who Wasn’t There. Larry complains at one point that he feels like ‘the carpet has been pulled out from under me,’ not dissimilar of course to the Dude’s stolen rug which ‘held that room together.’ The pre-credit prologue is similarly to the foregrounding pattern of Raising Arizona and some of the character names have distinct echoes of those of Barton Fink (Larry Gopnik/Jack Lipnick – which begs the question is Larry the new equivalent loser archetype name, as in Curb Your Enthusiasm, just as the name Jack is the contemporary go-to name for a hee-ro? But then what is a hee-ro anyway?).
So why such a different reception for No Country For Old Men and A Serious Man? Well, apart from the ‘more authentic’ source material, the films both feature ‘lower list’ actors in principle parts (Tommy Lee Jones excluded), both feature sharply cut, open endings and both feature more abstract, non linear sound design and musical accompaniments. No Country, it was widely noticed, had no musical cues and relied on gaping silences to build tension. A Serious Man has a musical accompaniment designed to be completely at odds with the visual, in fact, it often totally ignores what you are seeing completely. The Jefferson Airplane schtick is like a call from another West Coast universe like that of the Dude, to embrace chaos. (Or be a hippy pirate maybe; Sy Ableman tells Larry ‘I think, really, The Jolly Roger (a motel) is the appropriate course of action.’ Jefferson Airplane’s 1972 album in the height of hippy melt down is called Long John Silver).
That is a marked difference with films like Burn After Reading and Raising Arizona where the musical and sonic designs are either more ‘conventionally’ structured or deliberately heightened to give that cartoonish effect (the latter famously inspired in part by Tex Avery cartoons). Because they then adhere more closely to more ‘populist’ and recognisable structures, they are then not taken as the Coen’s ‘serious’ films. But it does makes you wonder that in order to ensure you are taken seriously, should you just cut away suddenly from the middle of a point to black?
