Accept Mystery

Some observations/comments/thoughts on A Serious Man (the movie that is partially responsible for this blog):

-The final sequence/shot is one of my favorites of the year. It's poignant and moving in a way that is rare in the Brothers' movies.

-The movie stands out from the rest of their work in other ways, as well: it isn't a riff on a recognizable Hollywood genre, no pastiche of earlier film styles, and no perpetual motion farce mechanics pushing everything along. About 40 minutes into the movie, a guy sitting behind me asked his companion: "When's the movie going to start?" An understandable question, considering how central "the plot" is to most Coen Bros. movies, but misplaced here, where the mode is episodic, incremental, and observational. The movie slowly gives us the bits and pieces of its larger shape, but leaves it up to us to put them together.

-One of the Coens' "weaknesses", is that they are great screenwriters, but "merely" intelligent, well-schooled directors. They aren't necessarily the most inspired filmmakers, and I sometimes feel that they are too concerned about crossing all their scripts' T's to notice when concepts that work on paper don't quite translate to the screen. For instance: I think the Busby Berkeley number in The Big Lebowski is a funny joke, but as a piece of filmmaking, it's a little stiff; the last act of No Country for Old Men strikes me as being, all in all, too on the nose; the Baby Face Nelson scenes in O Brother make sense conceptually and thematically, but play much more shrilly than seems warranted; and with just about every other scene in The Hudsucker Proxy, their reach exceeds their grasp. Here, though, they're working on a more modest scale (even though their theme is cosmic), and almost every moment feels fully achieved.