You might not be able to tell from her roles in Fargo and Burn After Reading, but Frances McDormand is a fox. I caught her on my way into the Claridges Hotel, where we shared a profound, if fleeting, connection during our brief waltz through the revolving door. I was about to join 15 or so other young, bushy-tailed journalists for a 20-minute round-table interview with her husband, Joel Coen, and brother-inlaw, Ethan Coen, about their hilarious and devastating new film, A Serious Man.
My peers and I were served finger sandwiches and coffee while waiting to speak to the duo, who are quite arguably the most original and prolific filmmakers in the movie industry today. I nibbled my miniature cucumber and egg salad sandwich as I debated which of my questions (because I might only get to ask one) would enable me all at once to: 1) learn the secrets to success in the film industry – not because I intend to actually enter the industry, but just because it would be cool to know, 2) be appreciated as a thoughtful and intelligent interviewer, 3) learn whether the Coen brothers are, in fact, as nihilistic and inscrutable as their movies are, and 4) what, if anything, they have against physicists.
Joel David Coen and Ethan Jesse Coen grew up in the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park, Minnesota, in a community very similar to the one depicted in A Serious Man. Their father was an economics professor at the University of Minnesota and their mother taught art history at St. Cloud State University. Asked to what extent A Serious Man draws on their own lives, Joel responds, ‘It’s not really autobiographical because the story is made up.
But consciously we sought to recreate the community that we grew up in. There are a lot of similarities to our own background there: we went to Hebrew school, we were bar mitzvah’ed, our father was an academic, a professor at a midwestern university, we grew up in a house like that, in a neighbourhood like that.’ As to whether any of the characters in the film are taken from their own upbringing, Joel notes, ‘the character that Michael Stuhlbarg plays in the film is not anything like our father; he couldn’t be more different in many ways. ’
Ethan adds, ‘Aaron [Wolff]’s character is probably a pretty typical kid of that environment and probably we were too; not particularly like him, but a part of that time and place.’ Possibly the only directors apart from Woody Allen who can work with actors like Brad Pitt and George Clooney without worrying too much about the commercial viability of their films, they explain that they chose not to cast any stars in A Serious Man because ‘It would diminish the feeling of “here we are in the everyday reality of this suburban Jewish community in 1967”.
One doesn’t expect George Clooney to show up there.’ However, after a moment’s wistful reflection, Ethan mutters sheepishly, ‘I’m not saying… maybe I wanted George Clooney to be there a little bit.’ Joel laughs, and they exchange an inside joke that none of us get. Given the Coen brothers’ dark, sometimes cryptic sense of irony, it’s easy to think when you’ve seen the film that the phrase ‘a serious man’ is intended mockingly. However, Joel clarifies, ‘It’s a little ambiguous even in our own minds.
It’s even ambiguous in terms of who it’s supposed to be referring to. In our minds it’s referring both to the Sy Abelman character who’s called a serious man in the movie and Larry who kind of aspires to whatever stature that implies. But no, it’s not meant to be – maybe there’s some irony in it, but it’s not meant to take the piss out of him really.’ Like some of the Coen Brothers’ earlier films – most recently, No Country for Old Men – A Serious Man depicts with stark indifference the cruel arbitrariness of the human condition.
When asked to what extent this is meant to be a running theme throughout their work, or at least in No Country… and A Serious Man, Joel responds, ‘I mean it’s interesting… they both kind of have that element… it must be at some level interesting to us.’ And that’s all we’re getting on that. The protagonist of A Serious Man, Larry Gopnik, is a physicist whose life, while in some sense devoted to the search for order in the universe, begins to unravel as a result of seemingly unpredictable events beyond his control.
Joel elaborates on their reasons for choosing Larry to be a physics professor: ‘We thought it was more interesting to make him a scientist and that way of looking at the world and that sort of rationality was up against… in the face of the things that are happening to him – that he’s looking to spiritual leaders for answers for the things he’s going through was sort of interesting to us. And it was interesting to us that mathematicians and the more mystical parts of the Judaic tradition try to make sense of the world through numbers.’
Throughout their long career, which began with 1984’s Blood Simple, the Coen Brothers have repeatedly been called nihilistic, misanthropic and deliberately inscrutable. Their surprise when we ask them how they respond to critics who use some of these adjectives to describe their latest film comes as something of a shock. Joel: ‘Nihilistic?’ Ethan: ‘Well, I don’t know why you call it misanthropic. It’s about a character who’s looking for some kind of meaning and he’s getting repeatedly stymied in that quest, but you know, that’s the story. The character doesn’t achieve any kind of clarity or get a grasp on any kind of meaning that’s satisfying for him, but I don’t know, that just seemed like the story we were telling as opposed to an expression of a larger point of view that we have ourselves.’
Aware of the frustration that past interviewers have sometimes felt in attempting to extract a message from their work, we asked them whether the characters’ failed searches for meaning and the unsettling ambiguities of the film’s ending were intended as a sort of rebuff to those who would attempt to ascribe broader significance to their work.
Ethan’s response? ‘No…no, really. I…no, I don’t think so. I mean, no…no, it’s a…yeah.’ It’s complicated, apparently. We moved to the lighter subject of their working relationship and methodology. Given that they’ve lately been producing movies at the rate of one a year, often writing the screenplays as well, do they sit down every day and write two to three thousand words? Joel: ‘Oh, shit no.’
Ethan: ‘You know it’s funny. It feels to us like we’re fairly lazy and yet relative to other people we do seem to get a fair amount done but that just seems to reflect poorly on other people as opposed to well on ourselves.’ ‘You know, what are they all doing?’ Joel interjects, laughing. Ethan: ‘We get very little accomplished and yet we’re outpacing many of our peers… it seems odd to me… When we were younger we did spend more time doing it – production even more than in writing. Longer days, six to eight weeks. We haven’t done six to eight weeks in ages, in terms of shooting weeks.’
Joel: ‘We would work longer in the editing room.’ He looks over to Ethan and they laugh, as if Ethan already knows what he’s going to say. ‘It’s so prosaic. As we get older, we like to go home and spend time with our kids..’ Good thing that, like most people, they reserve their nihilism for their day job.
